Name: Charlotte Bishop Nature: Fanatic Demeanor: Pedagogue
Primary Virtue: Vision Creed: Visionary Concept: Psychology professor
Strength 2 Charisma 3 Perception 3
Dexterity 3 Manipulation 2 Intelligence 4 (Logical)
Stamina 3 Appearance 2 Wits 3
Alertness 3 Drive 1 Academics 2
Awareness 2 Firearms 2 College Lore 4 (Alcohol)
Dodge 2 Melee 3 Computer 2
Empathy 2 Stealth 2 Linguistics 3 (French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin)
Expression 2 Psychology 3
Instruction 3 Research 3
Science 3
Virtues: Vision 3, Zeal 1 Edges: (Vision) Foresee, Pinpoint; (Vengeance) Cleave
Backgrounds: Arsenal 2, Mentor 4, Patron 3, Resources 3
Merits: Alimony Recipient, Healthy Skepticism
Flaws: Defective Sense (sight), Driving Goal (find a scientific explanation for the existence of monsters), One Arm, Vengeful
Background: Charlotte Katherine Singer was born on January 11, 1972 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Myron and Patricia Singer. She was an only child. Her parents were both college professors, her father at Harvard, and from early childhood on they put her under a lot of pressure to succeed. Fortunately, Charlotte was up to the challenge and soon proved herself to be an excellent student, especially in the sciences. She was valedictorian of her high school class and went on to do nearly as well at Vassar, where she became interested in the biological reasons for people’s behavior and earned undergraduate degrees in biology and psychology. To release tension from her studies, she took up fencing and soon discovered she had natural talent there as well. (She even went to the Olympic trials in 1992 but failed to make the U.S. team.)
Charlotte graduated from Vassar in 1994 and immediately went to Northwestern to continue her studies. There, she also met a young man named Peter Bishop, a graduate student in biology who lived in the same apartment building as her. They became friends almost immediately and, about two years later, began dating. Their relationship lasted through thick and thin, and in 1998 they decided to make it permanent and got married.
Peter and Charlotte stayed in Illinois while Charlotte finished up her second doctorate (she has PhD’s in psychology and neuroscience), then decided to start looking around for teaching positions. Eventually, they both found jobs at the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty there in 1999. Charlotte has been there ever since. She teaches mostly introductory seminars and upper-level neuropsychology classes, uses the lab facilities to work on an ongoing research project to isolate the neurotransmitters that cause anger, and acts as an assistant coach and advisor to the fencing club.
Charlotte’s life was fairly stable until three years ago, when Peter quite suddenly decided that he wanted a divorce. The papers cited “irreconcilable differences,” but Charlotte is fairly certain Peter divorced her because he’d decided he wanted to start a family, but after more than a year of trying Charlotte had just found out she was infertile. He ended up marrying the biology department secretary only six months after the divorce became final. They already have two children.
Charlotte had just adjusted to the single life when, five months ago, something even more unexpected happened. It was a Friday night, and she was working late in the biology lab, trying to reach the next breakthrough in her research. Around 2 a.m., a strange, disheveled, somewhat sick-looking man who Charlotte had never seen before wandered into the lab. He smiled at her, and Charlotte could have sworn he looked like a well-preserved corpse with fangs. A little shaken, she decided to call campus security and have them escort him out. She dialed the number, and a strange voice on the other end said, “ITS ACTIONS HAVE A PURPOSE. FIND ITS MOTIVE.” She hung up the phone and turned around to see the guy standing right next to her, still smiling weirdly. Struggling to keep her cool (and realizing that if he attacked her she’d be helpless), she tried to calm him down by talking to him. The man proved to be relatively friendly and very talkative, and after about ten minutes’ worth of conversation she figured out that, for some reason, he wanted some of the blood samples that were in the lab refrigerator. Hoping he’d leave her alone, she gave him the blood, and he thanked her and ravenously drank it then and there. Charlotte was disgusted but also intrigued by the presence of a being she’d never thought existed. Charlotte and the creature, who told her his name was Temple, talked late into the night and agreed to meet again in the future.
Several days later, Charlotte was walking through the humanities building when a sketch on an office door, nearly hidden by other papers and pictures, caught her eye: the symbol for “visionary.” Recognizing a kindred spirit, she stopped to talk to Dr. Jonas Winters, the inhabitant of the office, whom she soon discovered was a fellow Visionary. Jonas agreed to help Charlotte through the aftermath of her imbuing and serve as her mentor. When she told him about her contact with Temple, he advised her to be careful but told her to do whatever she thought would help her understand the enemy better.
Charlotte talked to Temple a number of times over the course of the next three months. At first, he was somewhat apprehensive about revealing his true nature, but when Charlotte reassured him that she only wanted to help he began to tell her many strange and inexplicable things about himself—he had powers even more bizarre than Charlotte’s own, he needed blood to survive, and it didn’t seem that he was entirely happy with this state. She turned to her scientific background for answers, hoping she could isolate and cure whatever imbalance or disease caused Temple’s problems, and soon came up with only one sure conclusion: If she was going to learn anything, she would need a larger pool of test subjects. (The only experiments she ever conducted on Temple were inconclusive.)
Later, Charlotte would realize that her biggest mistake was asking Temple to introduce her to other creatures like himself. Jonas advised her against it, and when she wouldn’t be dissuaded he insisted on taking her to the meeting place and waiting outside in case things got ugly. Charlotte made arrangements to meet with Temple’s “friends” late at night one weekend in November. There were about ten of them, hanging out in an abandoned building in the warehouse district of Minneapolis. At first, most of them were reluctant to even talk to her, but she eventually managed to put them at ease and make some headway with the idea of participating in her “study.” Things were going well until, a few hours into the meeting, one of the doors opened abruptly and another group of rots burst into the warehouse.
To this day, Charlotte doesn’t understand the exact nature of the quarrel between the two groups of rots, but she knows that it quickly turned violent. Realizing that she wouldn’t be getting anything else out of these particular subjects for the night, she started heading for the door only to find her path blocked by three snarling rots. She tried to fend them off but soon found herself backed into a corner. Just as one of them was about to sink his teeth into her, Temple came up behind them, his eyes glowing red. He hissed at the other three and they backed off. Charlotte picked herself up off the ground, said “Thanks, Temple,” and began walking past him toward the door. He growled at her and quite suddenly sprouted a set of claws which he raked across her chest. She went sprawling into the wall, but as he lunged for her again she saw a loose board leaning against the wall next to her, picked it up, and hit him across the face with it, burning him horribly. Charlotte took advantage of the distraction to run for the door, but she didn’t make it very far before she felt Temple’s hand close around her left wrist with an iron grip and a searing pain in her shoulder. She soon passed out from the agony.
Charlotte’s next memory is waking up in a hospital bed with Jonas sitting next to her. He explained that he’d heard the commotion and gone into the warehouse to get her, at which point he’d taken her to the hospital following the “horrible car accident” that had resulted in the loss of her left arm and her other injuries. Charlotte was, of course, profoundly grateful. She stayed in the hospital for a few more weeks before returning to teaching and an outpouring of support from the college.
Now, two months later, Charlotte is trying to go about her life as usual. She still believes quite firmly that there must be a scientific explanation for why monsters are the way they are, and will stop at nothing to produce one. However, she is considerably less optimistic about the nature of monsters than she was when she first began. The best analogy Charlotte has found so far is that being a monster is a life-threatening disease whose exact nature is still unknown to her. When she understands the disease, she’ll know better what to do about the patients. For the time being she’ll deal with them on a case-by-case basis. Those who are willing to cooperate with her and other hunters, and who aren’t causing any real problems because of their sickness, will probably be left alone but monitored until she understands why they are the way they are, and thereby how she can put an end to it. However, those who show no interest in getting better can’t be left to themselves like human psychiatric patients who prove to be hopeless cases. They’re simply too much of a liability to be allowed to live. Of course, all of this rhetoric is irrelevant when it comes to Temple, who Charlotte plans to get rid of once and for all the next time she sees him…