(Just to clear up any misconceptions, I’m not asking for characters that are going to be central to the story. I’m talking about bit players. Customers at the bar, things like that. Characters that will have a brief description and a little dialogue but not much else.)
Well the biting three times isn’t how my characters are made into vampires, but I know the perfect location for this cow. She could live at the U of A Experimental Farm over on Roger between Campbell and Mountain… I have always wondered why it was called “experimental”… what kinds of experiments are they doing? Maybe the experiments have made a cow that tastes like people! :eek:
What!?!
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Shadowrun.
Seppi is an interesting character, Arnold. I think you should write your own story with him as a central character.
Carlos Avaceda. Born in Nicaragua in the early-mid 1970s. Family lost everything in the revolution, older brothers joined a contra gang and brought him along with them. He saw more than a kid should and learned to be a soldier at too young an age. Was granted refugee status in the U.S. in the first Bush administration. Unsuited for anything else, he joined the marines. Made it to Sargeant. Saw action in Fallujah. Now works with one of his Marine buddies doing construction/ contract work. Tired of violence, but quite capable of it should the need arise.
It’s not a specific character, but an idea concerning characters’ activities and how they relate to vampires/vampirism.
Arnold Winkelried’s Seppi has a passion and skill for woodwork, which, as Arnold noted, would come in handy for making stakes. OpalCat, how about giving one (or several) of your characters advanced skill or knowledge in a specific field, that they could apply in clever ways to ward off vampire attacks?
I really, really hope you could include this character in your book: a down and out aluminum siding installer who also happens to be the world’s most prolific science fiction short story writer. Old, dirty, lives in a one room apartment in New York City and his only companion is a parakeet named Will. He comes up with science fiction ideas constantly, and is constantly writing them out in the form of short stories on an old beat up typewriter. And this is the thing: he never tries to copywrite anything, he just keeps on sending out story after story to any bottom of the barrel dirty book publisher or whatever who uses his stories as filler between their featured dirty pictures. He has a small but devoted following, but nobody knows who he is; and he’s dirt poor, having never received a cent of royalties in his life. (BTW, his name is kind of funny, he calls himself Gilmore Stout.)
As a matter of fact, I do! And you are free to them.
I’ve been wanting for a while to have a character whose first name was Brand, but I couldn’t find anything to fit him into. I imagine him being a young man with long, copper-colored hair, who is very quiet but when his temper is sparked, is not to be fucked with. He’d probably make a good vampire. I also imagine him with a long, Scandinavian surname.
There’s also Dr. John Forrester. He’s a botanist. He has severe social anxiety and is phobic of about everything under the sun, so he doesn’t go outside very much and prefers to stay inside talking to his plants, who are his best friends. He’s a tall guy, very nondescript looking, with perpetually ruffled clothing and hair, and taped-together glasses. He might be a college professor. I’m not sure how he could figure into this story.
Seppi is definitely the best character in this thread, hands down. Arnold Winklereid, have you forayed into fiction writing yourself? You seem like you’d be a great comedy writer. In general I love the varying directions this thread has taken, including the people riffing off the Seppi post and having fun with it.
EDIT: Sorry for ruining the joke, but just for reference, Koxinga’s proposed character is Kilgore Trout, a recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. I have the feeling his post may be a reference to the fact that he finds the book described in the OP derivative (which I have no opinion on), or a reference to the comment that you can’t copyright characters.
On rereading the OP, I see this is specifically set in Tucson. Hm. So much for New York – except maybe you could have Gilmore Stout hitchiking to Tucson to take part in an arts festival or something?
You big meanie.
The book is told from the point of view of a vampire who doesn’t attack people, though…
Sorry–gotta leave this thread to invent an app called “SeppiSearch”. It’s a Timed Amazon Algorithm. So I can automatically do a search every month for any books that might have been published with a character named Seppi.
Ignore Seppi?!? :mad:
Seppi is not rich, and has no banking grandfathers that hoarded Nazi gold. From him rising before dawn to milk cows in the barn, one might have assumed that he has his own dairy farm in Tucson. No! He has come to Tucson as a student, taking classes in Agricultural Science at U of A. The cows that he is visting are, of course, in the U of A Experimental Farm.
What is special about this cow? Isn’t it obvious? Perhaps not to you, but to Seppi (with the help of his friend Jerome Jamarillo - see above), it will soon become horrifyingly clear.
Seppi came to U of A because his closest childhood friend, and distant cousin, Norbert Brodard (also from the district of Gruyère, Fribourg, Switzerland) is a visiting professor there. Despite growing up on a farm, Norbert has become a famous biologist. Little does Seppi know what secrets lie behind Norbert’s unassuming façade!
For one thing, Norbert is one of the last descendants of (in)famous researcher Victor Frankenstein, who, as we all know, was from Geneva, now part of Switzerland. As a young man, Norbert found in an old satchel in the attic, containing a series of papers describing V. Frankenstein’s experiments, and was fascinated by them.
Secondly, Norbert Brodard’s father was very religious, and secretly a member of a right-wing offshoot of the Opus Dei, who are sworn enemies to members of other faiths. Norbert has been raised to espouse his father’s beliefs.
Thirdly: from birth, Norbert has been told of the death of his Swiss mercenary ancestor, for whom he was named, Norbert Bourgknecht, who died at the Siege of Nice (1543), in which the Turkish attackers fled when local washerwoman Catherine Ségurane mooned the invading forces. Jean-Joseph was part of a tiny group of Swiss mercenaries sent by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as advance forces to help defend the city against the Franco-Ottoman invaders, and he was killed by a Muslim soldier. This, and his intolerant Catholicism, gives rise in Norbert to a fanatical hatred of Islam.
After becoming a rising star in bio-medical research at the Université de Lausanne, he comes to the USA for furthering his career, and is hired by a shadow branch of the CIA who knows of his medical talents, his discovery of the Frankenstein notes, and his hatred of Islam. He is placed at the U of A Experimental farm to ostensibly develop a more productive bread of dairy cows, but his true work is something quite different. The CIA’s nefarious plan: take recently diseased Al-Qaeda insurgents from Afghanistan or Iraq, freeze the bodies, and ship them to Tucson, where their Pashtun-speaking brains will be transplanted into animal bodies (specificaly cows)!!! Then the brains will be hooked up to a super-powerful ARM processor and a third-generation RFID device. The mutant animals will be released in the mountainous areas of Afghanistan, their brains will understand what the locals are saying to each other, the ARM processor will decode the signals, translate them to English, and store them in flash memory. Then a CIA spy will come with a recording device, take the stored messages being beamed out by the RFID chip, and send the data back to the CIA headquarters in Langley to be examined by intelligence officers. :eek:
However, what the CIA does not know is that there are a small group of stripper vampires infesting the Tucson area. Dr. Norbert Brodard has a weakness - he loves exotic dancers, and one evening, in the arms of one of the beautiful performers, in his drunkenness he lets slip some of the details of his work. The stripper vampires immediately realize the potential. Experiments to turn animals into vampires have never worked, because non-human physiology and brain structure is too different. But could a cow-human hybrid be turned into a creature of the night? Perhaps! And if so, imagine the benefit! If one could transform a dairy cow into a vampire, instead of giving milk, the cow could produce gallons of blood a day - food enough for several vampires! Vampires who repugn the killing of humans could raise vampire cows!
Little do the vampires realize that these cows will, unfortunately, no longer be content with their traditional diet - they will require a diet of blood.
Seppi will be the first to realize the truth, but will he survive in the showdown against his childhood friend, the CIA, the Opus Dei, and the herd of vampire cows?
I’m Dale, except I can be physically intimidating and will fight :mad:
So, you already have my character. 
Addendum to previous post:
Some people might object, saying that the CIA would never come up with something so outlandish. To those people, I say: exploding cigars, anyone?
But a little more background could be helpful. This plan had been hatching for a long time. The details were finalized in early 2009. It was shown to our new Commander-In-Chief who, upon hearing the proposal, immediately said “This is so crazy it just might work! I want top men to be in charge of this. Top. Men. You have carte blanche.” The anonymous CIA under-secretary who presented the dossier did not realize that his appointment, after being rescheduled several times, was eventually set for 2009-04-01, and President Obama assumed that this was another one of Hillary’s practical jokes.
No need to be a jerk about it, Diogenes. Cut out the insults, please.
Ellen
Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, … one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present .
I find this site very useful for generating names. http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm
Sometimes the name implies a personality.