PAN, gavriel chao

[gavriel]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=style, width: 400px; height: 380px; background-image:URL(http://i800.photobucket.com/albums/yy284/brooklynlolli/x0r3w0.png); border-left: 10px solid #1e1e1e; border-right: 10px solid #1e1e1e;] GAVRIEL CHAO PAN ------------------------------------------------- NICKNAMES gav, gavie AGE 161/driver's license says 29 GENDER male SPECIES vampire ALLIANCE light SEXUALITY bisexual PLAY-BY godfrey gao YOUR ALIAS sarah ------------------------------------------------- Gavriel Pan hates vampires. Like, so much. Which is weird. i. Once upon a time, in California during the mid-19th century, there was a family of Chinese immigrants who'd been brought in to work on the Pacific Railroad. It was one of the biggest unified infrastructure projects in America's young history, and Pan Chao's father and older brothers lived day in and out at the beck and call of supervisors having them build it. The pay wasn't great, the locals even worse. And in the wake of the Mexican-American war, tensions were high and hostile among...just about everyone. It was an easy world for shit to go wrong in, and getting away with murder wasn't work, it was a shrug of the shoulder. And it was a veritable buffet for vampires. Social explanations for missing people, new immigrants without much knowledge of space or culture, hundreds of expendable laborers milling around. The Pan family was one of many families struggling to live in a new country that seemed so ambivalent to them; telling them to go back where they came from but at the same time telling them to stay to do what they needed. Chao didn't understand it, how could he, he was about eight at the time and his memories of China were fading fast. But he was brought into the work world early, helping his mother and sister around the house as best he could. Which was what he was doing when half his neighborhood caught fire one evening. He was coming back from the market when he saw the black smoke rising up from above the small houses. He can't remember it very clearly, not the moments leading up to what happened. But he remembered clutching what he'd bought and running into the rapidly catching section of town. And he remembered the bodies, laying haphazardly in the street. Some of them shot up, some of them ripped apart, some of them just slightly moving. And there were those people. Ones he'd never seen before moving like ghosts through the night, running after screaming friends and neighbours, darting into houses including his own. And as he approached it stealthily, not sure of what he would find he saw him; his father hung lifeless over a chair, neck half ripped out as if by some animal, flames running out into the living room from the back. Screaming coming from a closed door, that glowed eerily yellow. His brother by the wood stove, contorted horribly into no living shape. Everything that followed felt empty inside of him, he'd been all horrored out in the first few minutes. But the image that stuck clearest in his mind was his sister in the mud as the flames crept closer and some...thing being at her. Tearing at her as she fell out of consciousness. And like it was a dream, Chao couldn't scream. Chao couldn't do anything, and that's haunted him ever since. They were everywhere, those creatures. The ones who destroyed his family, his neighbours, everyone he knew. And how he survived he'd never understand. They found him in the morning underneath an overturned wagon covered in mud and mute from shock. ii. It took Chao a good long while to get his mind straight after what happened. He was taken and sent by the city, along with a few other survivors of the 'curious and deadly blaze' to an orphanage where they named him Gavriel, because a good Christian name was likely to get him adopted faster, if ever. He never minded the name. He kind of liked it even, and he lived at that orphanage until he was about sixteen. The orphanage was nice, even if they didn't abide him speaking Chinese. He knew there was worse out there, if he could get through what he saw in the blaze that night, he could get through anything. Especially when he saw one of them again. When Gavriel was a teenager he was allotted a certain amount of responsibility around the establishment. He was charged with a lot of upkeep; chopping wood, fixing pipes, general handy labor. It was fine, he really didn't mind it at all. He was of the adaptable sort, not a lot tended to bug him unless it hit a particular nerve. And that was what he was doing one evening that was colder than usual. They didn't usually have to make huge use of the boilers; the climate was warm enough. But in the middle of the night he'd been asked to go down there and do something about it. So, wrench in one hand, kit in the other, Gavriel had been working on heating things up a bit. And he was tired enough that he didn't see a shape in the back of the kitchens on his way up from the basement. What he did see, however, was one of his contemporaries, a girl he'd known for about five years at that point, apparently sleepwalking towards him. He tried to shake her out of it; gently at first, even seriously. But nothing, and she pushed past him until something came at him out of the shadows. It happened pretty fast. It jumped at him, he took a swing at it. And it was one of them; befanged and pale and ravenous in its eyes. It was so much stronger than him. More than he thought he could deal with, and for the second time in his life, Gavriel was certain that he was about to die. Except he didn't. Apparently the girl being shaken from her trance was enough to distract the creature, enough for him to do some quick thinking. He stepped on the handle of a broom not far off, and through sheer dumb luck, he stabbed the creature and watched the life leave its eyes. Gavriel was horrified, exhilarated, and had suddenly found a purpose. iii. Ten years later, Gavriel was a hunter. He was quick, he was efficient, and he worked with extreme prejudice. And unfortunately that afforded him a racially charged nickname he really didn't like; the Yellow Peril. Which he called the White Nonsense. But, 1870s America,what're you gonna do. He worked systematically through counties, hunting down vampires and taking them out. But slowly Gavriel Pan was becoming legendary, working with other hunters during the period, mostly on his own. And he loved it, he didn't care who he was helping, he was just glad that he was maybe stopping the same tragedy that happened to him from happening to someone else. He found a strange amount of camaraderie with other hunters, most of whom came from messed up situations and could identify with what he'd been through. It was a good network, finding places to stay throughout the US. In his first ten years he must have gone back and forth through the country twenty times. But Gavriel liked being a traveling man, his sense of home was long gone with the rest of his family. It was a hard life, but it was one that kept him driven and happy. And he was glad to indulge what was inside of him that drove him to kill without a second thought. Gavriel fought vampires exclusively; he didn't care about anything else. Vampires he took to be the most insidious of any creature, able to twist people internally as well as out. Something that just kept going without nature. Something that needed to be put down if any of them had ever been capable of doing what happened that day. And maybe he was a little obsessive, maybe it seeped into his psyche in a way that he didn't like. But damn if he wasn't glad to do what he did. It was a goddamn public service. He tried not to let out how much it ruled him, but he knew people could see it. Gavriel was ashamed, he wasn't sure how to explain it, really. It just was. But that meant he'd gathered his fair share of enemies as well.It wasn't as if he didn't stick out in a sea of predominantly white hunters and showed up in white towns. He tried hard to be conspicuous but sometimes it just wasn't enough. Either way, he would have to go into hiding for long periods on occasion, sometimes letting people think he was dead. Indeed, Gavriel ended up dying so much over the course of his career that people fully expected him to come marching back when he did die for real, although Gavriel would have preferred not too. After about fifteen years as a relatively high profile hunter he found he was starting to become...followed. He started receiving more frequent attacks at his home, started being tailed at night. eventually Gavriel found that he couldn't stay in the same house more than one night and soon he was cornered in his own tiny section of an ass-end town. He literally could not leave town for fear that he'd be ambushed as soon as he ended up far away enough from any town limits to get help from like-minded folks. He became isolated to one small house, having to deal with constant break ins, attacks. And then one day, he wasn't as fast as he used to be. Which is right about the time that some vampire got creative and played a relatively cruel joke. iv. He woke up in blackness a few days later, and fought his way out of a coffin to his horror. Gavriel, despite what had happened to him in his life, was a moral creature; he couldn't quite handle the idea of still feeling like himself, and knowing that hunger. And since he was finally afforded the opportunity, he ran. He disappeared into the night, and he never sought out any of his old acquaintances again. Gavriel went through several stages of coping with being a vampire. Typical things; brooding, trying to avoid eating, overindulging in eating, all that normal jazz. And by the time he found his way into a reasonable rhythm about it, he felt like the whole century had passed him by. He left America. He disappeared into Europe for several centuries at that point, staying quietly under the radar; drinking the right amount, doing his best not to hurt anyone. But the one rule he held sacred, the one thing he could absolutely never abide was associating with other vampires, and it's a rule he's always kept. It could almost be considered a phobia. It made him feel legitimately disgusted to be around them. The weird thing was though, as time passed and he got older and subsequently more powerful, a new pattern emerged in him: he started seeking out other vampires and offing them. Out of nowhere, and perhaps it was built from some new mania. If he could still kill them without feeling anything, surely he wasn't one of them. He was still Pan Chao in his heart, a separate creature, a good man. Something better than what he'd learned that he could be. Something that wouldn't make his parents roll in whatever mass grave their labourers town had tossed them into. It started to get easier as time went on. Technology got better, the world was easier to jump through. New identities at the drop of a hat. And eventually he came back to America, to live in the country that had housed him at his best and at the beginning of his worst. He could be somebody new again. v. At 161, Gavriel lives in Manuka under the assumed identity of a young university associate professor in American Literature. And he's well liked; he's friends with the staff, his students enjoy him for the most part. It's his first year teaching after getting a lucky break just two years after completing his PhD in english. He always jokes that he couldn't help it, he was just in the right place at the right time but the truth was he just wanted the job because it was comfortable, engaging, and in a subject he was interested in. And he got it through the expected means. Either way, for all he knows he might just get relegated to research duty after a year. Such was the way of the business. Well, if it leads to one day getting tenure, he doesn't care. He likes his life at the moment, and finds that a university campus is one of the easiest places to track down and kill vampires; they're everywhere. But he tries not to do it so often, so as not to draw huge attention to himself. Sometimes he worries he has an older student among his one little class who might be that special kind of older. Gavriel is pretty good at balancing the dual life that his version of hunting requires, but at the same time there's another issue he has to dodge, being the way he is. Other hunters. And he calls them 'other' because he wants to feel the same as them. He's a hunter. Not a vampire serial killer. That's just silly. But either way, he's not exactly of the opinion that he'd be welcomed into that fold with open arms, it's a crowd he knows well, after all he was a part of it. He still considers himself to be a part of it. Compulsively. In day to day life Gavriel tries his best to be opening and approachable, and tries not to be too harsh with people as a rule. He tends to be relatively polite and inoffensive when he can be, but still a little bit eccentric. He collects antique books and has them set in a lovely shelf in his bottom-of-the-teaching-totem-pole office, he has a rather surrealist sense of humour that only really comes out under his breath from time to time, he likes to paint even though he's not very good. But he likes to foster good connections and get to know people as best he can, he wants to remain connected in the world. He doesn't want to be like one of those vampires, or any for that matter. He simply wants to axe himself off from that part of life unless he's feeding. That's just how he is, he doesn't know that it's such a bad thing.

[/div]

-------------------------------------------------

RP SAMPLE

at least 300 words.

[/div]

[/td][/tr][/td][/tr][/table]
made by brooklyn at caution[/center]

[SEAJAY]