Characters

Hello again!

There are two big hurdles I need to overcome for the British version of Vatican Vampire Hunters. The first is smoothing out the plot and making the villain's appearances and role more straightforward. We'll cover that in a later entry. Today's topic is the second hurdle - the characters.

Transitioning the action from Italy to the UK demands some changes to the heroes and villains of the piece. Lucy, as an outsider and the viewpoint character, remains intact. Father Gelasius is likewise unchanged. Everyone else, though...

Brazilian Sister Ana Branco is now Sister Anne Howley, a native Englishwoman. Aside from the name change, not too much is different about her. I may dial up her slightly otherworldly feel a little, as long as I don't go overboard.

Lucy's fellow American, Marty Black, is now a British fellow of Asian descent named Joe Kottayil. His American football mania and Texas twang are gone with the old name, but he's still basically the same guy.

The last hunter, Nathalie Dumont, is probably the most changed from the first draft. A French Canadian really didn't work with the UK-centric team that's assembling for the new version, unfortunately. I briefly considered keeping her the same just from Belgium instead of Quebec, and making her an immigrant (there's a small Belgian British community, per Wikipedia at any rate) but that version of the character wasn't really working very well in my imagination. She's now become Lily Sweeney, an inner city English girl of Irish ancestry. Writing a Liverpool accent will be an interesting challenge (by which I mean it will take a few runs through with my British friends to make it non-laughable), but personality wise, I'm on solid ground, as Lily is based on a character I've played in PBEM for a few years now.

As far as the villains go, the vampire formerly known as Liana Negri has a name change to Elizabeth Masterson, and a few background tweaks to bring her from Italy to England. Kirya the vampire remains Kirya, but she's a proto-Celt instead of proto-Arab now. And that pretty much brings us up to speed... Now back to the second draft!