#vampirejackets

TAISSA TURNER

"Politicans are vampires anyways, I'm just fitting the model."

A Sleepwaker, a rare offshoot of vampire that’s basically two beings in one body: her “normal mortal self” and her “vampiric self.” The catch? The vampiric instincts only surface when she’s asleep. So while day-Tai is a focused, ambitious overachiever juggling pre-law classes, night-Tai is… a predatory blur of hunger and instincts.

Mortally embarrassed about this. She wakes up with blood on her hands (sometimes literal), no memory of what she did, and a very good reason to keep herself extremely sleep-deprived.

She’s gotten very good at pretending she’s just a Type-A insomniac, but anyone paying attention (like Van) notices the cracks: half-eaten vending machine wrappers under her bed, vague scratches on her arms, bizarre excuses for why she “fell asleep in the library and woke up in the ceiling rafters.”

Deep down, she’s terrified that her vampiric self will hurt someone she cares about—making her the most cautious, self-controlled vampire on campus by day, and the most reckless, animalistic one by night.

VANESSA "VAN" PALMER

"Happy wife, happy life. Hunting is just like really intense tag, anyways."

A vampire hunter who has somehow survived hunts that should have been her last a dozen times over. She’s got scars she wears like badges of honor, and a gallows humor about the fact that she should be dead by now. Her friends joke she’s the “Final Girl of the Hunters’ Guild.”

Her survival isn’t due to skill so much as sheer stubbornness and luck. She’ll run headfirst into fights and walk away bloodied but still standing, much to the bewilderment of everyone around her.

Meets Taissa as part of the guild’s suspicions about the Sleepwaker phenomenon. Instead of killing her, she ends up fascinated—partly because Tai’s “mortal self” is so different from her vampiric one, and partly because she sees the loneliness behind Tai’s façade.

Their relationship starts with sharp banter and slowly softens into trust, which only deepens when Van chooses to be turned. It’s less about “wanting power” and more about solidarity: if Tai has to live straddling two worlds, Van wants to live there with her.

Childhood: Violence as a First Language

Natalie never had the luxury of innocence. Growing up in a house where every slammed door or raised voice might spiral into fists, she learned early to gauge survival by silence. Her father loomed over everything: cruel when drunk, controlling when sober, and too affectionate in ways that blurred the lines between father and daughter. He treated her less like a child and more like a stand-in partner, feeding her attention that felt suffocating instead of loving.

Her mother, trapped and brittle, endured it until she couldn’t. When the violence escalated into full-on beatings, Natalie’s sense of helplessness curdled into rage. She was fourteen the night it all broke: her father screaming, her mother crying, the house vibrating with chaos. Natalie grabbed the rifle by the door, a move born more of desperation than intent. She leveled it at him, voice shaking, daring him to stop.

He didn’t stop. He laughed, ripped the gun from her hands, and walked outside as though she were nothing more than a brat throwing a tantrum. Natalie chased after him, hurling words at his back. When he spun, rifle in hand, the weapon went off. A deafening crack. His skull opened like glass. He was dead before he hit the ground.

Her mother’s screams weren’t grief for a lost husband — they were pure, raw blame aimed squarely at Natalie. “You killed him.” Those words rooted deep. They followed her into every quiet moment afterward.

Recruitment: The Guild’s Watchful Eye

Natalie’s grades cratered after the incident. She floated through school like a ghost, reckless, skirting expulsion, testing boundaries of drugs, alcohol, violence. It was in this chaos that the guild saw opportunity.

The hunters always had eyes in schools — counselors, teachers, local authorities — trained to pick out the “broken ones.” Kids who could be shaped. Natalie’s profile was perfect: violent household, early exposure to guns, no tether to family, no future on paper. She was approached by someone posing as a counselor who spoke to her not about healing, but about purpose.

The guild whispered that she wasn’t lost, she was chosen. That she could turn her pain into something holy, righteous. Natalie didn’t believe a word of it — but they offered a bed, food, training, and most importantly, an exit from her mother’s accusing eyes. So she agreed.

Training: Pain as Religion

The guild stripped recruits down and rebuilt them like machines. Dawn runs, survival drills, sleep deprivation, brutal sparring sessions. Discipline wasn’t optional; it was survival. Sobriety was mandatory — intoxicants were seen as moral weakness, and Natalie quickly learned to channel the itch in her veins into relentless effort.

She became obsessive about the details. Firearm safety checks, tracking patterns, cataloguing weaknesses. Where other recruits simply absorbed doctrine, Natalie sharpened control like a weapon. Pain kept her from spiraling, exhaustion replaced the urge to self-destruct.

She hated every word of the guild’s sermons. “Purity through violence. Morality through eradication. Humanity is sacred, monsters are not.” But she kept her head down. She nodded when she had to, repeated doctrine when it was demanded, and quietly filed every contradiction away for later.

Initiation: The Wolf Hunt

The guild’s final test was almost theatrical. Every initiate chose an animal, stalked it, killed it, and returned with bones and hide. The instructors used the remains to craft ceremonial gear, a “hunter’s uniform” meant to symbolize purity through conquest.

Natalie chose the wolf. Not because she wanted to, but because she had no choice — anything less than a predator would be read as weakness.

She prepared obsessively. Two weeks of watching, learning the land, setting bait. The hunt became less about ritual and more about control: if she could predict the wolf, she could control the outcome.

When the moment came, there were two of them — a mated pair. Her shot dropped the first cleanly. The second thrashed, wounded, its cries raw and wild, and Natalie had to finish the job with shaking hands.

The instructors celebrated her “strength.” They said taking two proved she was ruthless. They took the pelts and bones, returned them days later as a cloak lined with wolf fur, bone clasps carved into the shape of fangs, a mask fashioned to mimic a snarling muzzle. It was meant to look fearsome.

To Natalie, it felt like wearing their deaths on her skin. She still wears it when required, but every time she fastens it she feels like she’s carrying a coffin.

Missions: A Catalog of Hypocrisy

Natalie was placed on a squad and sent into the field almost immediately. She learned quickly that the guild’s rhetoric and reality were two different things. To them, every hunt was holy. Every kill, righteous. To Natalie, it was shades of gray painted black-and-white.

She started carrying a journal. A battered, duct-taped thing with “GET OUT OF HELL FREE CARD” scrawled across the cover in Sharpie. Officially, Misty pushed for hunters to keep mission logs. Unofficially, Natalie used it to document everything the guild didn’t want recorded.

The Hollow Town Mission: They were sent to a rural community where livestock had been drained. The guild branded the local vampire “feral.” Natalie’s log, however, noted evidence that it had been feeding only on animals, and had avoided humans entirely. She watched it die anyway, executed by order.

The Church Nest: A burned-out church housed a cluster of vampires who had been starving, skeletal, barely clinging to unlife. The guild report praised “the cleansing of corruption.” Natalie’s journal described them as “ghosts who begged, not fought.”

The Bridge Incident: A mission where Natalie disobeyed orders to save a human civilian trapped in crossfire. The official report erased her actions, claiming “no humans present.” Her journal recorded the woman’s name.

Each hunt became two stories: the one the guild wrote and the one Natalie refused to let vanish. The journal was her tether, her way of ensuring that when the time came, she could expose every hypocrisy.

Natalie’s Relationship with the Guild

She doesn’t believe in their purity. She doesn’t believe in their morality. She believes in survival, in justice untainted by dogma. The guild, to her, is a cult dressed up in weapons and sermons.

And yet she plays the role. She wears the wolf-hide cloak when told. She recites the lines. She sits through sermons. Because she’s biding her time. Every rule she follows, every mission she completes, every detail she logs in that journal, it’s all fuel for the eventual fire.

She intends to destroy them from the inside. Patiently. Completely.

Present-Day: College & the Waiting Game

By the time Natalie ends up in the college setting, she’s a strange balance of cynicism and sharp focus. Outwardly, she’s the sarcastic, reckless hunter who doesn’t quite care about authority. Inwardly, she’s a strategist, mapping every inconsistency, every weakness in the guild.

The journal comes with her everywhere. Beaten-up, stuffed with scraps of paper, stained with rain and blood, pages filled with cramped handwriting and scrawled margins. To anyone else it looks like junk. To Natalie, it’s scripture — the real history, not the guild’s lies.

She’s only staying because it’s safer than going home, safer than slipping back into addiction, safer than the emptiness. But every night she rereads old entries, remembers every hunt, every unnecessary death, and steels herself for the day she finally turns the guild’s own records against them.

She doesn’t know if she’ll survive that day. But she knows she’ll make sure the guild doesn’t either.

LOTTIE MATTHEWS

"Eating my professer would not help my GPA."

A vampire who really, really should not be allowed near humans—her self-control is abysmal, and she goes into uncontrollable frenzies at the mere taste of human blood. To cope, she sticks to animals, sneaking around campus with bags of squirrels, raccoons, and the occasional stray pigeon.

Has the absolute worst poker face imaginable. Any time she’s questioned about her weird habits (red eyes after feeding, strange nocturnal schedule, “accidentally” hissing at the sunlight streaming into their dorm room), she panics and blurts out an excuse that makes zero sense.

Her most consistent cover story is that she’s in the "taxidermy club"—a club that, suspiciously, no one else on campus has ever heard of. She doubles down on the lie every time Natalie questions her. “Yeah, it’s really exclusive. Invitation-only. We meet in… uh… the basement of the bio building.”

Despite being a supernatural predator, she’s oddly gentle. She’s very much someone who struggles to blend in with normal college life, constantly stressed about both her secret and her GPA.

NATALIE SCATORCCIO

"I would rather disembody a corpse than do one more math assignment."

A member of the hunters’ guild, assigned to investigate the possibility of a vampire hiding out on campus. She’s balancing late-night patrols, secret guild meetings, and essay deadlines all at once, running mostly on caffeine and spite.

She’s razor-sharp when it comes to spotting supernatural threats… everywhere except directly in front of her. She has no idea her own roommate is a vampire, even though all signs point directly to Lottie.

Thinks Lottie is just “a little weird” and maybe going through some kind of indie taxidermist-goth phase. She’s too preoccupied with her mission, assuming the real vampire is someone else on campus—maybe that weirdly pale philosophy major, or the guy who always wears sunglasses indoors.

Has a sardonic sense of humor, rolling her eyes at Lottie’s quirks, but deep down she likes her roommate. The guild work is heavy, violent, and serious—so Natalie finds herself weirdly grateful for Lottie’s awkward presence.