background }{ personality

[matermali]

BACKGROUND:

► BEFORE...

Growing up in Victorian England, Vanessa was best friends with Mina Murray. The two girls were inseparable, doing everything together from sharing a bed (probably not like that but also maybe kinda like that) to practicing taxidermy (like young girls do). One evening, Vanessa spotted Mina's father Sir Malcolm Murray having an affair with her own mother. It awakened something within her, and a part of her enjoyed watching the sexual deviance. Years later, her repression over her conflicting feelings for Mina and against Sir Malcolm finally boiled over. She grew more sexually reckless, beginning by kissing Mina’s brother and culminating in Vanessa seducing Mina's fiancé right in front of her. The families were forever torn apart. She prayed for her sins, but instead of God, “another answered”.

Not long after, she fell ill. Unbeknownst to her family, she had been possessed by the Devil. At a mental asylum, she underwent hydrotherapy (torture), and befriended an orderly. At one point, Vanessa was visited by visions of Lucifer and Dracula using the orderly’s guise, but she used her own powers through Verbis Diablo to scare them away (“You think you know evil? Here it stands”). This reveals that even though later on she is taught the language of Verbis Diablo, she already innately knew it. She nearly succeeded in convincing the doctor she was normal afterwards, but failed when he asked her about religion. After a trepanning, she was released back into her mother's care, and the memories surrounding the orderly became repressed. Vanessa was partially catatonic for awhile, but in the end the surgery was unsuccessful, and her mother died of a heart attack after seeing her having sex with Lucifer while possessed.

Some time after, Vanessa had a vision of Mina, who begged her former friend to find and save her. Determined to find Mina and understand her own powers, Vanessa sought out Joan Clayton, the Cut-Wife of Ballantree Moor, an infamous abortionist and hedgewitch (self-labeled a Daywalker) living in the moors of England. Under her tutelage, she learned more about her powers and others who would desire them; she also learned herbalism and other Daywalker skills such as blood totems. Joan taught her more about the Verbis Diablo, but cautioned her on its use or it could consume her soul. Joan told her that her magic was innate rather than learned, but it still needed to be honed; Vanessa had more raw power than Joan had ever seen, but she needed to learn to protect herself. ("I knew it the first time I felt you, this danger. I wanted to scream and bolt the door, curl up in my little bed and sleep and sleep. But you came closer. I felt you every step across the moor. ... I felt you walking to my door. Felt you standing there. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.")

Witches in service to Lucifer (Nightcomers), led by a woman named Evelyn Poole, schemed to separate her from Joan and deliver the former to Lucifer. Evelyn helped convince a mob to execute Joan by burning her alive before they branded Vanessa's back with a cross and left her traumatized and alone. Joan had left the land to her in her deed, but Vanessa was too broken-hearted and bitter to stay. She also had a newfound purpose from the knowledge that Joan had bestowed upon her.

She left the moors soon after, eventually taking her new knowledge and seeking out Sir Malcolm to make amends for her past sins. The two agreed to work together to find Mina, despite old animosities towards one another.


► SEASON 1

Vanessa offers an American named Ethan Chandler a job as a hired gun. Initially he’s hesitant, but she is able to draw him in with mystique and a promise of danger. Together, they are unable to find Mina, but enlist Dr. Victor Frankenstein into their cause. Vanessa and Malcolm attend a party with Dorian Gray and participate in a séance, where she is possessed by Satan and the spirits of the dead.

As they continue their search for Mina, Vanessa pursues a romantic relationship with the enigmatic Dorian Gray. During a sexual encounter with Dorian, she becomes possessed by Lucifer once more. She begins by taunting Malcolm and Victor with their sins before the demon completely takes over her actions. She becomes feral and violent, and needs to be restrained. For a month, she battles the Devil inside of her, and he appears to her under many different guises. Malcolm implores Vanessa to reach out to Mina while her connection to the demimonde is heightened, but she is unsuccessful. Eventually, a priest comes to give a dying Vanessa her last rites, but she attacks him. In a moment of clarity, she begs Ethan to kill her. Instead, he holds a pendant of St. Jude to her forehead and chants a prayer in Latin, begging for divine intervention. The exorcism is somehow successful, perhaps through their combined wills, and she collapses. When she wakes up, she claims to know where Mina is.

The group wade through a horde of vampires until Mina reveals herself, eventually attempting to bite Vanessa so that she can deliver her to Dracula. Malcolm shoots Mina, claiming Vanessa is his only daughter. The two are distraught over Mina's death, but bond over their grief. She tells Dorian Gray that she can’t be with him, too afraid of what happens to her when she loses control. She seeks out a priest and asks for a formal exorcism, but once the priest asks her if it’s what she really wants, she accepts that some part of her doesn’t want to expel the evil within. ( “If you have been touched by the Demon, it's like being touched by the backhand of God. Makes you sacred in a way, doesn't it? Makes you unique, with a kind of glory. The glory of suffering, even. ... Do you really want to be normal?” )


► SEASON 2

Vanessa and Ethan are beset upon by Nightcomers who are only repelled when Vanessa overpowers them with Verbis Diablo. She becomes paranoid and despondent, and the group goes to great lengths to protect her. During this time, she also befriends John Clare, a homeless man who she does not recognize as the reanimated orderly from her imprisonment in the Banning Clinic, because that memory has been repressed along with others related to her time 'before'. At the same time, Sir Malcolm is bedeviled by Evelyn Poole and Vanessa notices his oddities but thinks it to be the fog of love, given that she doesn’t recognize Evelyn as the Nightcomer from years past on the Moor.

When she attends a ball thrown by Dorian Gray, the Nightcomers' presence overwhelms her, and she has a bloody vision before fainting. Determined to seek more power in the book of the Poetry of Death left to her by Joan Clayton, and believing she can’t trust those who attended the party with her, she flees back to Ballentree Moor. Ethan Chandler follows, and during their shared solitude, they become much closer. The only thing keeping them from being lost to a moment of physical passion is Vanessa’s acknowledgment that the two of them together ‘are dangerous’. During this time, she is given the opportunity to exact vengeance on one of the perpetrators of the mob that murdered the Cut-Wife and branded Vanessa, and against Ethan’s warning, she uses the Poetry of Death and Verbis Diablo to possess the man’s dogs from across the Moor. Ethan watches with a bullet still in the chamber as the man is mauled to death by his own dogs. He tells her that she’ll never get her soul back. ( “Welcome to the night, Vanessa.” ) At least the second time she takes a life, when a bounty hunter attacks the both of them in the night, Ethan joins her in the kill, subduing him while Vanessa stabs him to death.

Vanessa and Ethan are called back to London when the leader of the Nightcomers, Evelyn Poole, takes Malcolm captive in her manor. Understanding that her friends would only be bedeviled and captured if they join her, like Sir Malcolm, Vanessa takes the knowledge she’s re-acquainted herself with on the Moor and steals away to face the witch alone, only to be confronted by a fetish doll made in her own likeness. The doll, possessed by Lucifer, tries to compel her to join him.

Unfortunately for Lucifer, he grievously miscalculates Vanessa's power. Using his own Verbis Diablo against him, she banishes him back to Hell, and he is never heard from again.


► SEASON 3

Despite her success in overcoming Lucifer, Vanessa loses everything. She loses her soul and her connection to God. She loses all of her friends—one of whom died in the last battle, while the others left to pursue their own goals. Left alone in the wake of such desolation, Vanessa becomes consumed by a depression that leaves her avoiding outside life for months. Only cobwebs are her company while she sits on the floor and tears into delivered food like an animal. More and more she scratches at her hands; more and more she shrinks from the mirrors.

Through an intervention, Vanessa begins seeing an alienist, and she slowly allows herself to become vulnerable with someone while trying to pursue something like life again. She falls in love with a charming zoologist who looks as safe and pleasant as can be. Unbeknownst to her, Dr. Alexandar Sweet is Dracula, one of the incarnations that Amun-Ra has taken over the millennia. With Vanessa left alone, he seizes the opportunity to manipulate her into his embrace. For the first time in her life, Vanessa feels accepted and adored for her true self, and she knows what it's like to make love.

It's only after that Vanessa learns the truth. This breaks her emotionally. Without a plan, she approaches Dracula's lair through the front door with the same open animosity that she had once entered Evelyn Poole's castle, only this time it's with a broken heart and a crushed spirit. She points the gun at him knowing she can never really pull the trigger, not now that she's fallen for him. Her disgust and her hatred have become entangled in a venomous love, and with nothing and no one to believe in, she is seduced for the final time. Dracula asks her to accept him, but in giving herself to the darkness, she 'accepts herself'. With her consent and his bite, Vanessa finally 'ascends', becoming the very thing she's been running from her entire life: Amunet, the Mother of Evil.

The sun goes out out. Warmth wanes. Pestilence spreads and night creatures rule, while thousands perish. Vanessa wants none of it, but it's what she's created in her final attempt at ending her own life. She knows that once this is done, she will have made her own fate, in some wretched way. It will lead Ethan back to her, who carries his own destiny.

In her dismal lair with Dracula, surrounded by groveling vampires, Vanessa hopes and waits. When Ethan finds her, despite him begging her to leave with him, she pleads for him to let it end, and guides his gun towards her heart. With a kiss, Ethan Chandler pulls the trigger, and she dies in his arms. By his hand, Amunet will never again be reincarnated.

Dracula escapes, but Armageddon ends, and Vanessa Ives' suffering is mercifully over. It's the closest to peace she will have ever known.

PERSONALITY:

Even as a child, Vanessa struggled with her own contradictions, and it's gotten no easier as an adult. She was afraid of the dolls she had to play with ( “Those eyes staring at you, just waiting to come to life. Who thinks that's healthy for a child?” ), and yet grew to appreciate taxidermy as an older girl and young woman ( “I put mirrors behind the glass eyes, so they would spark.” ). Such attempts to turn her fears into a strength are common for Vanessa, but they rarely pan out the way she intends. Her inner conflict runs too deeply, down to her soul.

It would be difficult for the average passerby to notice any such conflict, however. Vanessa carries herself with a very specific poise, controlling everything in her life that she can: fashion, posture, diction, and who she allows to get close (the latter is often a failure). She uses this control over herself to an intentionally obscure degree, knowing that the mystery she can present will draw certain types in. When necessary, she can use this to manipulate them to her own ends, as with Ethan Chandler and Dorian Gray both. ( Dorian: You have exceptional composure. [...] Poise, I mean. | Vanessa: Control. | Dorian: Yes. What if you were to abandon it? | Vanessa: I couldn't. ) The illusion of control also helps her cope with her inner demons, both psychological and real.

She knows the dangers of losing control, that she risks her soul whenever she gives in to her primal, often sexual urges. It keeps her afraid enough to place most people at a distance, but she still wants. For all her perfect fashion and poise, Vanessa desires touch; to be loved and known and accepted. She'll go so far as to not wear gloves at parties (scandalous!), hinting at the desires beneath. She denies herself the sexual urges as much as she can, but she still seeks out stimuli. Exciting ventures, yes. Friendship...risky, but yes, how she wants that, too. She can love deeply, and wants love in return, but she doesn’t know if she can trust what love does to her. Her love lingers with her guilt, as she continues to write letters to Mina that she will never see. She will hold her friends, kiss and comfort them; she will tease them with a twinkle in her eye as they blush and both laugh together, but no matter how dear her friends are, there will always be just a sliver of distance between their spirits. It’s a trace of enigma that she's reluctant to let go of, save eventually around Sir Malcolm or Ethan Chandler. With others, she uses the mystery innate to her presence, enforcing an illusion of control over people as much as herself.

Once someone has her love, though, she will do anything for them. She will risk her life for them, she will kill for them, and she will kill them if it's the kindness that they need. As much guilt as she feels over betraying Mina and sending her down her path of unholy torment, Vanessa doesn't seek her forgiveness; she's ready to kill her beloved Mina to free her from Dracula's embrace. As much as she resents Sir Malcolm for being the one to trigger the darkness within the young Vanessa, she loves him with a ferocity that sends her with murderous intent into an ancient witch cult. Her love can consume her, it never truly leaves her, and so she's reluctant to hand it to just anyone.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, she’s well acquainted with religion and believes that God has a plan. Unfortunately, she also believes that darkness will never stop following her, because it’s in her very soul now. She’s sinned to the point of murder, her essence tainted by Verbis Diablo, and part of her resents that despite all of her prayers, God never seemed to listen. Outwardly, she will preach God’s word and openly defy the Devil even while acknowledging her dark path, but within there is turmoil. She knows herself, claims not to fear it, but fear it she does—until she learns to wield it. She wants God, but some part of her wants the Devil more.

That part of her manifests in selfish or even vengeful behavior at times, especially when she has a goal in mind that she deems far more important than anything else. Others haven’t suffered like her; they don’t know and so they can’t begin to understand. She doesn’t think herself a martyr, because she has not yet been taken, but she does believe that her suffering is solitary, and that when it manifests in its full force, these resentments towards others are unleashed. When possessed, it isn’t all Lucifer or Amunet; it’s also Vanessa unleashing a pain that she buries too deeply. When the others engage in torturing a young vampire for information on Mina, Vanessa does nothing to stop it. She will do what needs to be done to achieve her own ends. ( “We here have been brutalized with loss. It has made us brutal in return.” )

At her best, she can show incredible empathy towards those who suffer or seem lost, in part because she can see herself in them. On her own, she doesn’t seek out good deeds, but when guided towards them she will feel glad for any kindness offered to others. Part of that is selfish, too, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t kind; just that her kindness is difficult to shake from an ever present melancholy. She is forever in her own world─in the demimonde─and she often doesn't have any room left in her thoughts for the every-day concerns of most people.

Vanessa claims that her soul belongs to God, but at the same time admits that her soul is lost to the night. Which is it? This is her need as a human versus her want as an old god, and she’s unable to separate them or understand from which soul these desires come from. It's both her shame and her desire manifest. The truth is that she doesn't want a normal life, even while she envies those who revel in normalcy. She wants to want it, she knows it's what she should want, but in certain moments she can’t deny the Demon within. Just as a priest reminds her, the glory of suffering is uniquely hers. She’s not so quick to let go of her twisted divinity.