A little preview of what I've been working on, on-and-off, for the past few weeks or so. Kat (BleedingVampier7), and I got the bright idea to do a large character web of her vampire-related universe, after trying and failing to summarize even a tenth of what's going on to one of our friends. Taking that into account, we figured that we'd need a space roughly the size of a wall to put out the important bits and keep the relationships between characters somewhat clear. I decided that if we were doing this, I'd need it to be somewhat portable, because I only have one day off a week to work on something huge, or loads of free time in the spaces between classes, work, and professor's speeches...I chose to use note cards, figuring I'd draw on the plain sides and write a little info tidbit on the lines, then we'd pin 'em up and run 'relationship threads' in between. Like, say, red for a sexual relationship, yellow for friendship, blue for family, etc and have specific color marks for each clan/line/species/affiliation/etc.

This is not the easiest task for the uninitiated for a few reasons:
Firstly, there are several distinct groups, tough my haphazard drawing style will not be indicative of that. (Here there are two Father/Son arrangements, one psychosis/Friendship, and one Relationship. But none of these are an isolated instance, as we shall see.)
Second, being Vampires, Angels, and All Manner of Assorted Beasts, (as well as being drawn by me) apparent age is irrelevant. As is sex/gender, considering that their author is rather fond of girly boys.
Third, well, they're just plain weird.

To give you a mild clue what this might entail, I'll describe the cards shown here (from top-left to bottom-right):

Kade – Azrael (not that one)'s eldest son. A half-demon, half-angel/vampire-hybrid. Young, compared to the rest of the cast, maybe in his twenties, more likely in his teens. Would sleep with anything that shows interest, even his brother's self-proclaimed 'Boyfriend' (Who's also slept with both of their fathers...at the same time.), until he fell for exactly the wrong girl...Ol' Lucifer's daughter herself!

Azrael - I reiterate, not that one. He was just amused by the name and took it before realizing how much grief it'd cause him. Appears in his mid-to-late twenties. Formerly Miguel, an older Mexican university student with a thirst for knowledge that kept him moving long after his first death in the sixties. Now a member of a mutated half-vampire, half-angel clan bound to Earth, he has taken a demon lover and spawned two brats-er sons- Kade and Toben. His quest for the knowledge of the progenitor of the Vampires and truth concerning the Gods, ends (or perhaps begins?) ironically closer than he realizes...with his own brother.

Koyo - An Angel Fallen from Heaven for falling in love with a vampire, and also for learning certain Truths regarding the Gods. As part of his punishment/torture one of his eyes was ripped out by his own best friend, who firmly believed what the Elders told him. After his Fall, Koyo returned to his vampire lover, who was even then enacting a plan that would preserve the balance of the world in the event of his own death. Koyo is even now, reluctantly, seeing to that plan's resolution, between his work as an interplaner agent and fielding psychotic ex-friends turned stalkers.

Aston - 'Ash' A Fallen Angel obsessed with repentance...not to Heaven, but to his former best friend, whom he once secretly loved and was forced to betray by his own misplaced convictions, only to find on his own the Truths that he had once been blinded to. Caged and tortured by the Elders, his guilt fractured his mind and broke his soul into a mere shadow of itself, until that same single-minded force of will that had made him such a great weapon of Heaven, allowed for his escape. His repeated attempts to make up to Koyo range from sweet to downright freaky, as he is rather obviously unstable, but this makes Koyo probably the safest being in any realm (though not the safest to be around).

Bastian Nahuel Faikot – Just Bastian to most. A Manx, or ‘felitaur’ creature, with a panther-like main body and a hominoid head and torso. Yes, he does have a tail. The long-term partner to a rather ornery werewolf of the Okami line, and Cale’s father. He has a lot of patience. Being a creature of magic living in a largely ignorant human city, Bastian has commissioned or fashioned for himself and his son several transformative items which hide most of their strange appearance. (That body of his is massive.) Since this takes place twenty minutes into the future some things that aren’t changed, like Bastian’s pure black eyes and his strange coloring, can be explained away as lifestyle choices. The six nipples, extra back muscles, and extreme flexibility…not so much. Bastian is about 72 at the present of “Vampier” and will only live to be a century or three old.

Cale Lun Catalin – Another hybrid, and child of two men. (Well two men and their best friend who became the surrogate mother to carry him, and thus his “Aunt”.) His dad is the werewolf Jace Okami, and his father (whose magic enabled his conception) is the Manx, Bastian. He has mixed animalistic features as well as his more human ones, has some limited magical and telepathic capabilities thanks to Bastian, but does not involuntarily transform, because his own magic combats the effects of the already diluted lycan curse (though he does get really hungry around the full moon. And horny.). Like other werewolves, Cale eats humans, which is how he and the vampire Gabriel met. In addition to entering a tenuous relationship with Gabe and his long-term partner, Seth, Cale is trying to foster an agreement between Vince’s fledgling underground resistance and the werewolf Lines of the country.

Ethan – Lover of Vince (his Sire) and their third, Medina. A relatively newer vampire with an abusive past, which made his Sire act pre-emptively at his turning. The main man of “Vampier” though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. As he is constantly called ‘Pet’ by Vince, regularly plays at being uke to two vampires around the group, and they swear he stops time just to change his eye-liner at least once a day (and probably in the middle of a fight too), most of the main characters have no clue either, even Medina at first. But underneath that façade lies a powerful and power-hungry young vampire, who sees the way things could be…under his control. Too bad that he doesn’t see the key right in front of him.

Vince – The frontman of the group affectionately dubbed le Resistance (by me at any rate). A vampire with great sway in the aetherworlds of many areas of the country (or, well, a large portion of the world), including several personal pacts with various demons, a spy network reaching into several levels of government, an accord with the Fae, a small personal army, and relationships with both the biggest control freak in the known universe and the vampire with the Eldest Bloodline in existence. Un-Life is interesting.


*fwhew*


These are eight of about thirty-six drawn so far, but I specifically wanted to preserve the penciled images of these ones somewhere before Kat does the ink and color. There's just something about pencil drawings that gets lost in more permanent media...