Anaryn

From TCWiki

Pronounced anAHrin.

Author: Ameryll Windwalker Full Name: Anaryn Castella Jewish Name: Anna Rein

1 Basic Gist
2 Physical Description
3 Abilities
- 3.1 Disadvantages/Differences from Std. Vampires
4 Characterization
5 Victims
6 Backstory
7 Introduced

Basic Gist

An emotional vampire who, instead of draining blood, generates it and injects it when biting, in a blatant reference to the title character of the anime Karin (chibi vampire). She runs a small dry cleaning store called All the Perfumes of Arabia.

Physical Description

Tall, brown hair down to knees, very very thick, hides exposed skin from the sun. Dresses like a slightly modest prostitute when on the prowl. Otherwise, and old fashioned black skirt and maroon and black bodice. Silver eyes which become slitted like a cat when she's about to bite someone.

Abilities

Generates blood instead of drinking it (which is a need unto itself)
Decreased vulnerability to sunlight. (gets mild sunburn with exposure, and her eyes are sensitive to the light)
Can sense people to her taste-- namely those with a great deal of fear and self-doubt.
Can use a sword decently.
Manifests blood-red batwings when upset, which obviously grant the ability to fly. (doesn't actually know she can do this)
Limited ability to erase short term memories.
Unknown holy powers.
Some amount of ability to talk to animals.
Years of experience at cleaning and repairing clothing. She can repair or clean almost anything.

Disadvantages/Differences from Std. Vampires

Regenerates slower than a standard vampire because she needs normal food to do so.
Under normal circumstances she can't fly; however she can jump about a story at a time.
A moral code.
Her night vision and sense of smell are weaker than other vampires; but are stronger than the average human's.
Can't kill someone by biting them, under normal circumstances.

Characterization

Anaryn goes around cleaning up other vampires' messes-- or anyone else who needs a transfusion-- and biting them to give them a boost to help them get through their ordeal. She's shy but keeps running into Nick Summers for some reason. She's old, so she's sometimes a little moody. Generally, she likes to appear mysterious and evil like any vampire worth their salt, but she seems to have a compulsion to help people.

She runs a no-questions-asked dry-cleaning shop, and first met Nick there when he brought in his... unusual outfit. Well, not that unusual in MegaTokyo.

She's mostly Jewish out of habit...having been Jewish for over four hundred years. She doesn't follow all the rules anymore (she rarely wears strictly s'neas/Tzniut dress anymore as it's unbecoming of a vampire to be covered from neck to ankle to wrist, but still prefers to wear skirts). But surviving the Holocaust severely damaged her faith in God and in humanity. It's unclear how much. She still seems to have a compulsion to save people though, so she can't think humans are all bad.

Victims

Generally, Anaryn bites two subsets of people. The first, are people she rescues from other vampire attacks, or other potentially deadly situations where a blood transfusion might save a life. Arella was Anaryn's first bite in the thread. The second category tends to be shy young men. She tends to find someone who's afraid of relationships or afraid of women and seduces them. She has some fun with them, and makes sure that they have fun too, before trying to help them work through their fears and find a real, lasting relationship. She believes she had love once, when she was young, and you only find real love once, so now she's just enjoying life and a little romance here and there. And since she's attracted to fearful people, she feels that she should help them overcome their fears, since she benefits from them, and that's what makes them attractive to her.

Backstory

Birth is so Embarrassing!: Anaryn was born in the 1562 (2 years before Shakespeare), around the time of Shakespeare, in a small town north of London to a family of demonic vampires.
Fitting In is so Embarrassing!: Anaryn opened "All the Perfumes of Arabia" when she was 25. She longed to find a place for herself in vampire society, because that's where all her family was, but none of them could accept her as a blood maker. She decided that if she offered up a service they needed, they would be able to accept her. The vampire community in general reluctantly accepted this, but her parents were furious. As dukes of a small county in England, it was beneath their daughter to be doing laundry for others...especially for humans.
First Pets are so Embarrassing!: For her eighteenth birthday, her parents bought her a baby dragon, which Anaryn named Azuza. It is unclear whether they knew that Azuza had a growth disorder before they purchased her, but it was soon clear that Azuza was going to remain a miniature dragon for life. The dragon was not amused, but Anaryn didn't mind.
First Relationships are so Embarrassing!: It's unclear whether she and Shakespeare were lovers or just friends. But she was friendly enough with him to be able to get him to advertise her shop in "Hamlet."
Religion is so Embarrassing!: When Anaryn was young (age tbd), and hurt that her parents looked down on her existence, she ran away. She didn't stay in one place for too long until she visited Poland, where she stumbled across Judaism. The religion fascinated her and she learned everything she could about it. Eventually, she converted to it under the name of Anna Rein. (Which is no small feat when you're demonic and unholy and converting involves being dunked in a bath of holy water. But she knew guys who knew guys who made sure the mikvah water wasn't as holy as it should've been. Anaryn hadn't been happy about that but she knew it was the only way.)
Marriage is so Embarrassing!: People didn't entirely accept her as a converted Jew, but she was used to not being entirely accepted by that point. But they were still nice to her. She ran a sewing business out of her small house. That was how she met Aaron. Aaron was a nice young Jewish boy that fell in love with Anaryn. She fought the relationship for a long time, but after four years of courting, she finally gave in and married him. They moved to another Jewish community so that he wouldn't have to live with the scorn of marrying an outsider. There, she opened another dry cleaning shop and they lived happily above it.
Parting is so Embarrassing!: Aaron was relatively accepting of Anaryn's 'condition' for a long time. But when the years rolled by and he aged while Anaryn still looked to be in her twenties, he became dissatisfied. One day he finally came to a conclusion...he wanted to love Anaryn forever and would become a vampire himself. Of course, he couldn't become a vampire like Anaryn's parents, let alone her...they were born that way. So he found someone to make him into an undead vampire. Things didn't last long after that. People change with death, and vampires disliked Anaryn. Eventually, she had to go to the temple to get her husband pronounced dead in order to annul their marriage contract (In there's two ways to religiously end a marriage, through annulment or through a "get"/divorce which requires consent of both parties). Her husband took insult at this and had her chased out of Poland. But before she left, the rabbi at the temple took pity on her and sent her on a quest to learn to protect herself against her husband, should he continue to chase her to the ends of the earth.
Kabbalah is So Embarrassing!: Anaryn took what the Rabbi said to heart and went off to go learn self defense and reconnect spiritually by taking a pilgrimage to what's now Israel. She eventually found a small community of Jews in Safed, where she learned some holy powers to defend herself against her former husband. After that, dejected, lost, and alone, she returned to England and her family. This was probably in the 1700's.
Being Different is so Embarrassing!: Back in a vampire community once more, she found it hard to be both a part of the vampire community and a part of the human community since she didn't belong to either. Especially now that her parents had gone and had another daughter and a son, both normal vampires. But eventually she managed to find ways.
Leaving the Nest (again) is so Embarrassing! In the late 1800's Anaryn decided to take her leave again and this time decided to visit America. There, she moved to Texas in 1870, and stayed until 1897. When Anaryn wasn't living near vampires, by now she'd learned to move after a few decades...before people started to realize that she didn't age normally. She moved to New York until 1919, at which point she decided that she missed Poland and moved back there.
World War II is so Embarrassing!: Anaryn enjoyed being back in Poland until the late 30's, early 40's. She spent some time living in the Warsaw Ghetto (where she knew/possibly babysat Wraith Umbra) until she was taken on her way home from temple along with another 40 members of her congregation. She attempted to flee, so that the others had a chance to get away, but the soldiers decided to shoot at the crowd, killing at least two people. She stopped and allowed herself to be taken with the survivors. Fortunately, the Nazis didn't manage to figure out that she was inhuman and so she went to the normal concentration camps with the rest of the women from her temple. Unfortunately for her, once she was there, she very quickly found that she couldn't escape; her high metabolism required more food than a normal human and the nazi's barely fed them enough to keep an anorexic fed. But she was a survivor, and so she and a small group of women worked very hard to try to survive together. Of course, many didn't make it. Without enough food, her body reverted to blood consumption and once she accidentally bit another prisoner and killed them. The other women were remarkably supportive, and some of them gave Anaryn food in exchange for blood donations. Some requested to be put out of their misery, to keep others going. One mother asked to be killed, so that Anaryn had the strength to keep her daughter alive.
Running Away is so Embarrassing!: Eventually, Anaryn escaped with the four remaining women of her congregation by biting a sympathetic guard, removing his fears that the Nazis would catch him if he helped, and then convinced him to help them escape. The group of them fled to America, where Anaryn moved to New York with her comrades of war. In the 70's, once her friends started dying of war wounds and old age, she moved to Paris for a decade to revitalize her spirits. She opened up her shop again after a few years of sulking, in a spot fairly close to her previous time in New York.
Romance is so Embarrassing!: Anaryn moved to Paris for a stint, the city of romance where she wooed a great many shy young boys. She opened her dry cleaners and was there from 1970-1987, when she moved to California.
Colds are so Embarrassing!: She lived in Northern California from 1987-1998 where she purchased Sparks from a run down elite mount dealer; until Azuza got a cold and burnt down the dry cleaner's with a wayward sneeze.
The Present is so Embarrassing!: In 1998, Anaryn and her entourage finally moved to Megatokyo, where she's lives presently. She's had her shop in the hollows for about 10 years, though she recently closed it for a few months to do some renovations and only reopened in the last month or two.