#sbsallt

Nathaniel Burke || selkie || taken || George Blagden

Nathaniel was born the youngest out of his three siblings on the coast of France. His family were a tight knit pack, who travelled the seas every summer. The seas were good to him, and even if he acted as the mediator a lot to not only sea creatures but to his siblings, Nathaniel he loved his family. There were even other selkies to visit on holidays. Though as time was spent in France, more and more poachers came to their waters. Word got out in their village of the growing numbers in sea lions. Fishermen made their waters dangerous to hunt and swim. Nathaniel was caught in a net and was nearly lost from his family.

When he woke up, Nathaniel was in his human form on a distant shore, and a man with him, and Nate passed out again. When he came to, his family had found him, and he was safe, but they had to leave their shore with the growing danger. Other selkies had told Nate’s family about Soapberry Springs, a safe haven for creatures such as they. Now Nate lives here, free to swim and follow a career as the French Professor. Now Nate only dreams of the mysterious man who saved him and who he was.

How well do you take criticism? “Well, I think it depends.. I like criticism on maybe my work or when I teach. But never my clothes or my cooking.”

Jacqueline Davis (Begay) || || Taken || Werewolf ||  Kawennahere Devery Jacobs

Most of the time Jacky was of the mind that her peoples’ stories were just that, stories. Something to tell the kids to keep them inside after the sun went down. Something to tell each other to give encouragement and build bravery. Maybe even a psychotherapeutic allegory to work through interpersonal issues when it came to disagreements within the tribe. A few times in her life it occurred to her that the stories might be true, that Navajo Wolves and Witches could exist, but never so much as the night she went out to look for a lost sheep and was found three days later with three broken ribs, a broken arm, and a torn-up and bitten leg.

While some people chalked it up to an animal attack, other looked at Jacky with caution in their eyes and darkness in their hearts. The looks were enough to make Jacky nervous on her own land. Her family tried hard to be supportive, after all Jacky was their baby. Jacky tried to put it all behind her, even if it was a Navajo Wolf, they couldn’t be mad at her forever for the attack. If the bad medicine had infected her, there were a few rituals they could try to fix it, ways that would turn the bad medicine back on her attacker.

All that changed after the next full moon. The change was painful and terrifying, and Jacky woke up to 5 missing sheep and panic in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t stay with her family and put them at risk. They performed an Enemy Way ritual to try and relieve Jacky of her bad medicine, but they couldn’t change her mind. She took a truck, her camping gear, and the rumors she heard about hidden lands of monsters and started looking. Soon enough she found Soapberry Springs, maybe the town knew that Jacky needed solace, maybe it just didn’t see a point in turning away another wolf, but the young woman made it in.

Now Jacky wants to find a way to get rid of the wolf that takes control once a month, but might find more than she bargained for in the surprisingly friendly town.

Are you more worried about doing things right, or doing the right things? “After everything that’s happened to me, I don’t think there is a way to do things right anymore. All my life, even if I didn’t believe some of the stories, I lived by them. I kept corn pollen at my neck, I kept a turquoise charm in my pocket, and none of it protected me. I think the only thing anyone can do in this life is try to do the right thing, but knowing what the right thing is, now that’s the difficult part.”

Octavia ‘Via’ Fraser || witch || taken || Kristen Stewart

Octavia was born in some no name small town in the Middle of America, a town lacking in romance, adventure, and excitement. These were all things she craved from a very young age. Her parents knew this, they could tell from the moment she was born, she is a wind witch of the kind that needs to travel, that needs the wind in their hair and fresh air all around them. Sure when she’s traveling people sometimes wonder if she’s really running from something. They wonder if something bad happened in her past that left her without any ties to hold to one place for long. Those people are missing the point, because regardless of her past she was born for the road. Wherever the wind takes her, adventure awaits. Sometimes you make it yourself, living a little more dangerous than others might, driving fast, cliff diving, skydiving. Anything that gets her up in the air and wind in her hair. She can’t help it, she loves it and knows that wind loves her just as much. That’s why she never worries as much as other people, no matter how she falls she knows her element is there to provide a soft place to land.

To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken? “I go where I want when I want to- Some people may say I’m reckless, but I’m always in control. That includes when I jump out of a plane two hundred miles in the air or when I’m going 100mph on my motorcycle. Whatever I want to do in life, I’ll decide to do it or I wont. It’s that simple.”

Collette Mackenzie || nymph || taken || Emilia Clarke

Collette’s first memory was running through mortar fire and the low, guttural screams of Scotsmen. She could hear Englishmen issue their orders and the clashing of metal. The smell of churned mud, gunpowder and blood filled her lungs. But she kept running with a broadsword clung to her chest.

Every evening she’d walk that same moor to watch the sun go down on the heather. She’d rarely wear shoes, each footstep grounding her to the moment she met Man. Men were born of blood and battle and would die by it. Sometimes she’d even hear the call of the men she tried to save. Of the one man who tried saving her. And of the men she killed in turn.

Time rolled on and those who visited went from Redcoats with shovels to grieving Scotsmen with flowers and their heads bowed. Then to American tourists with their cameras. All of those men swore they saw a woman in 18th Century dress walking the moor. And stories grew of the White Lady of Culloden. How wrong they were.

Collette rarely ventured further than the town (then city) of Inverness, always near to the battlefield and museum they erected in honour of the event. But after a downsizing in government funding, several artefacts from the battlefield were sold off to the highest bidder. One Mackenzie broadsword mislabelled as ‘The Sword of the Bonnie Prince’ was shipped off to a small town in Washington.

A few days of feeling unwell, as if the grips of death were on her, Collette awoke one morning to find herself laying in the middle of a museum. And before her was the Mackenzie broadsword behind glass.

How well do you take criticism? ‘People can have whatever opinion they want of me. If they decide to share a foul view, I reserve the right to retaliate. But if they’re right and I can see that, I’ll take it.’

Luis Rivera || human || taken || Jorge Garcia

Luis was born in Hope, New Mexico, several miles south of the infamous town of Roswell. A child with wide eyes and an active imagination, his mother told him stories of her harrowing abduction and his birth many months later. It was much more pleasant than the reality, in which she became accidentally pregnant after a one night stand with a man who never called her back. Luis held that story close in his heart and mind–of course, three decades later he’s outgrown such ridiculous, childish fantasies. But every once in awhile, he’ll still try to move something with his mind. Y’know. Just in case.

Luis has always believed in the supernatural, the occult, the strange, and the unfathomable. Growing up, it didn’t net him many friends, so he spent much of his time alone, either inside reading about supernatural creatures or tramping around the wilderness looking for Area 51. An awkward, isolated childhood turned to an awkward isolated adolescence, turned into an awkward, isolated adulthood. But through it all, he never let go of his beliefs.

He found safe haven in the internet, where he could find communities of like-minded people and spend hours browsing blurry pictures of Bigfoot. This turned him onto a love for computers, which he pursued as a major and career path, since “parapsychologist” tends to get you a lot of weird looks. Plus, he needed money if he was going to go on adventures to discover the unknown!

His twenties and early thirties were spent traveling the country searching for any trace of supernatural activity. He had his encounters here and there, which he would document extensively on his blog, which gets hundreds of hits every week, he’ll proudly brag. He knows all of it is real, he just hasn’t had any real, intimate, face to face encounters yet.

Until now. Following a lead given to him by some of his internet friends, he’s headed for a new home in Soapberry, Washington. While at last he’s finally been validated in (most) everything he’s believed, he’s left to wonder if he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

How well do you take criticism? ”Ha! Pretty well if I do say so myself. Trust me, when you’ve been on forums as long as I have, you learn how to deal with a troll or two.”

Quinn Van der Zee || Merm || Taken || Tessa Thompson

Born just off the shores of Monterey, California, Quinn spent the majority of her childhood riding cresting waves, exploring underwater shipwrecks, and scaring idle seagulls. The sea was both her home and her playground, and each day brought something new and exciting with it. She didn’t belong to a pod in the traditional sense – with many different members – but she had her mother and father and siblings, and together, they were pod enough. Unfortunately, around the time she was five years old, her father, having chased after a school of fish, got caught up in one of the nets. Her mother had gone after him, instructing Quinn and her siblings to stay put. But they waited and waited, and no one came back for them.

They were on their own for a week, maybe two or three, hunting their own fish and mostly keeping to themselves. Even their play was subdued, affected by the absence and loss of their parents. Eventually, they were picked up by another pod, one that had pity in their eyes when they asked after their parents. But they took Quinn and her siblings in, and soon, she came to see them as family, too. What was strange to her was that her new podmates led double lives: they would spend the week onshore. Oddly fitting, though, was that many of them worked at the local aquarium: helping to rehabilitate sea animals, designing new exhibits tailored to mimic the sea for the ones who weren’t strong enough to go back to the open ocean. Quinn spent a lot of her time at the aquarium helping out with the animals where she could, and learning to speak their dialects.

And on the weekends, she and her podmates would return to the ocean, sleeping in coves hidden from humans and – at least in Quinn’s case – learning how to navigate the open waters. Even of all the members in her pod, Quinn had an uncanny knack of finding wreckages with long-forgotten treasures. She would sell little trinkets she’d find, and as she grew older, she realized how much more profitable this was than she’d ever thought. With a few of her podmates, she’d auction off her services: promising wealthy investors gold and riches that would make them even wealthier. Some of her podmates wanted nothing to do with it, calling it disgraceful – and the ones that had followed her into her venture eventually grew bored with it, fickle as merms could be, preferring to spend their time on other pursuits.

Not Quinn, though. She enjoyed the challenge of looking for the treasure, and even more so, she loved the money. So she stuck at it alone, hiring a crew at each location instead of working with her podmates. Now, she’s well-known enough in treasure hunting circles that investors come to her instead of the other way around. Her most recent investor has hinted that there are sunken treasures to be found just off the coast of Soapberry Springs, and so she set out for the slow, sleepy town to see if there’s any truth to the rumours.

How well do you take criticism? “I don’t really take any criticism; if you want to criticize me, I’ll just throw it right back in your face.”

Grace Villiers ║ Vampire ║  Taken  ║   Victoria Smurfit 

Introduction

She was born in an era of parents who would rather have had boys than girls, especially in high society London, and even more especially when their families were part of a secret vampire hunting society who passed their mantle down from parent to child. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Grace, Lord Christopher Villiers and his wife Elizabeth only had one child. Her. Faced with the choice of passing down his mantle to her or not passing it down at all, Lord Villiers taught his daughter everything he knew. She learned weaponry and combat alongside how to dance and curtsy. She learned that vampires were evil beings that needed to be wiped off the face of the earth. And she learned to be the one who banished them.

She was twenty when her father died and she joined the society in his place. For years she was underestimated and underutilised. Her mother convinced her to marry an older man, another Lord within the society so that the family could retain strength, and for years she waited for him to die too, to be killed on a hunt and never return. One day, her wish finally came true, and she played the grieving widow to perfection, but she had another motive in mind; to convince the society to let her throw herself into hunting the beast that killed him. Her grief would become rage, at least in their eyes, and she told them that if they did not allow her to do so, she would do it without them.

From that day on, she wasn’t in the shadows any more. The Vampire Hunter’s Society of London had a woman as one of its best hunters. She even found a relationship of love, not just tolerance, with a man named Fane. Like most great love stories, theirs began with them meeting at the scene of a murder. They met next to the body of Elizabeth Stride, the third victim of the killer who would be known as Jack The Ripper. There was no human man behind the murders, but a vampire, and Grace was on his tail when she ran into Fane. They both went for the killer, but got in each other’s way, causing him to escape. After questioning and being suspicious of one another, they heard another victim had been found less than an hour later, and it was then that they decided to work together in order to take the Ripper down. She had never seen the man in the London society before, but he moved like a hunter. After they defeated the Ripper together, they began a courtship.

It didn’t last.

It was only after she had already fallen for him that Grace began to grow suspicious of Fane. She had always been a suspicious and cynical person, but she swore sometimes she got the distinct impression he wasn’t being honest. She began trying to pick holes in his backstory, to separate the truth from his lies, hoping he would be proven to be honest and she would be proven to just be paranoid, but it was while doing some intense digging that she found a portrait of him in the society’s archives. It was from two hundred years earlier. Grace planned to confront Fane about it and on that night, he decided to propose. Overcome by emotion and anger, she lashed out at him, trying to kill him. They fought, and he got away. Anger and bitterness overcame her and she threw herself into her work, but like most hunters, she couldn’t live forever. It turned out the vampire who killed her would rather have her around as a companion though, and he sired her, almost as a message to the society. He knew it would isolate her, that it would make the society come after her too, and it did.

She left her sire behind the moment she realised what she was. Grace went on the run, crossing to Europe in search of Fane, not sure if she wanted to try and kill him again, or apologize. She didn’t find him, and she moved on to the Americas to get as far away from the society as possible. Over time, she adjusted to being a vampire, and discovered the things she had been taught about them weren’t necessarily all true. Some were monsters, but many of them were just people, as varied in personality as anyone else. She had almost forgotten about Fane, or at least pushed him out of her mind, when he stumbled on her as she was passing through a town called Soapberry Springs. It was as if they had each seen a ghost. Grace doesn’t know how she feels about him anymore, but she has to admit, it’s nice being in a town where she doesn’t have to look over her shoulder all the time. For now, she’s decided to stay and see what the place has to offer.

How well do you take criticism? “And why would someone be criticising me? Well, I suppose that answers the question for you, doesn’t it? I come from a time when women were criticised for everything, for merely existing, and though decades have passed, sometimes I fear time hasn’t changed society’s mind at all. Criticism against me is rarely valid. I don’t care what most people think.”

Tobiah “Toby” Hauser  ║  Werewolf ║  Taken  ║   Eddie Redmayne

Introduction

Toby was always the afterthought. His outgoing, vivacious sisters always stealing the limelight. While his parents fought and his sisters competed, Toby had his music. No one listened to him play, an artistic path in life wasn’t something the Hauser’s and Thompson’s agreed with. Toby was to be a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher, and nothing more. 

He wasn’t athletic, so he wasn’t on a sports team like his parents kept pushing. He was considered a nerd and an outcast, even though he wasn’t academic. He was just…Toby, and that wasn’t good enough for anyone. Nobody cared about ‘Toby’, just the person they wanted him to be that never was. The rough and tumble son, the handsome, strapping lad that had all the ladies swooning. That wasn’t Toby

He got along with his sister’s growing up, but they were so similar, and Toby wasn’t like them. Shivonne was loud and angry, demanding attention by disobedience, until she left for college and rarely came home. Alannah was sneaky, pitting everyone against each other for her own amusement and so she could do what she wanted while the parents competed, until she moved to L.A. and became an internet star, then she very rarely ever came home. So, it was just Toby left. 

Toby very rarely ever ventured out of Hurricane. It was only when he heard news that his sister had been on the run from her ex-boyfriend that he wanted some answers. When he arrived in Seattle, finding out about his sister’s whereabouts, that he began asking the wrong sort of people. On the wrong night to be out alone, the wrong people attacked him, but the right people found him. His nephew’s grandmother drove him all the way to Soapberry Springs, where she told Toby he would find his sister, and that there would be people there to help him figure out his new life as werewolf.

How well do you take criticism? “I think, even though I am a much more passive person than the rest of my family, that the genes I have contradict that. Whenever I’m criticized, I just nod and say “I’ll work on being better”, or whatever the appropriate answer might be, but in my head I’m angry, and I want to point out all of their flaws and mistakes. I never would, but the feeling is still there.”