Character sketches of Vee and Cris by moi:

http://3.bp.blogspot...00/veencris.jpg

Name:
Vivienne “Vee” Winters (Born surname Sommers)

Age:
78

six:
Female

Basic physical appearance and attributes:
At first glance, one would think Vee to be quite beautiful, with a trim, curvy feminine figure and soft features. In fact, one would rarely notice the dark circles under her eyes, the dry chapped lips, or the grayish gauntness to her skin. She appears to be of an indeterminate age, maybe early to late 30’s if you had to try and pin it. Her striking white hair is immaculately curled, her long lashed big brown eyes expressive, her full chapped lips in rouge. She wears quite a bit of makeup, though this isn’t excessively noticeable. She spends copious amounts of time on her appearance, though this is in part due to the fact that she is a ghoul, a secret that so far, she has been able to keep to herself. Her body is in the process of transforming, though it has been quite slow and she has yet to lose much flesh or hair. Thin hair and a small bald spot are trivial enough to be carefully concealed with styled hair and the most advanced areas of her body, her rotting right arm and shoulder, are always covered in full length sleeves and gloves, even at rest. The skin up her neck to her right ear has also rotten, but over the years she's had new skin carefully grafted over, the only remnant of the procedures a small, barely noticeable scar.

She wears black leather leggings, tall boots and a fitted leather top. Her outfits, while cut to accentuate her curves, tend not to show even a peep of skin – even at home she wears long sleeves with gloves. At her neck lies a locket with a picture of her late husband.

She has a bit of a soft touch, is unusually weak and yet quick and agile, her movements almost catlike in their easy grace. As a ghoul, she has an immunity to radiation and ferals fail to attack her in the few instances she comes across them.

Weapons and armour:
Hunting revolver
Dart gun
Reinforced Leather Armor
Stimpaks

Personality:
Vee is confident, charming and reckless. She’s very perceptive, quick to gauge others’ motives, her big brown eyes alert and probing. She’s proud and vain, with a sharp mind and talent for repairing, jury-rigging and inventing new weapons. Vee can lean towards selfish motives and taking advantage of others, though she’s hoping for a quieter, simpler life in Greyditch. Despite this, she is very likeable, friendly, flirty and funny. When she meets new people she likes to engage them in small talk, cracking jokes and gauging their personalities. While on the outside she appears controlled, inside she battles with self loathing and fear – fear of her future as a ghoul, a future where she’ll lose her good looks that she’s often relied upon, and further the degradation of her brain into feral madness. She also still privately grieves her husband’s passing, has obsessive compulsively taken on some of his habits, like lighting up a smoke after a meal or checking locks multiple times, in an attempt to not forget him – with time her memories of him seem to fade, which she fights against. She can also be absentminded and forgetful of small details, which bothers her greatly as she sees this as the beginning of the fall. For whatever reason, call it genetics, she is also extremely lucky – always coming out of a sticky situation intact. Due to this, and her philosophy of going out in a blaze of youthful glory rather than a slow death devoid of dignity, she will often act without caution, almost trying to will an “early” end…

Occupation:
Retired weapons business heiress/owner/manager/inventor of Sommers Inc, retired mercenary
General store shopkeep, tinkerer, repairs

Faction:
Greyditch

Backstory:
Vivienne was born into a wealthy family in Tenpenny Towers. She grew up spoiled, priviledged and prejudiced towards ghouls, supermutants and scavengers. Vee’s paternal grandfather, an inventor, had started a prosperous large scale weapons dealership that Vee’s parents later inherited. Despite living in luxury, they coveted a collection of schematics for a few rare weapons, among them the dart gun, that Vee’s grandfather possessed. Vee’s grandfather, however, had long ago become a ghoul and taken up residence in Warrington Station, refusing contact with his family. Vee’s father kept his father’s descent into ghoulhood a secret, as they considered it a stain on their family name.

As a teenager, her parents joined a raiding party into Warrington Station, hoping to personally confront and kill him, as well as take the schematics, but only one person ended up returning, a hired mercenary that noone knew much about. The survivor continued to stay at Tenpenny for awhile, nursing his wounds, and Vee, still young, grieving the loss of her parents, and struggling to overtake operations of the family business, Sommers Inc., befriended him out of loneliness. The mercenary, Frank, intended to move on after recovering, but the two ended up falling in love. Frank revealed that her parents had come upon her grandfather, but discovered that he had descended into madness, a feral ghoul. They killed him and had found the abandoned collection of schematics, but soon after were overwhelmed by an ambush of ‘zombies’. Frank admitted to grabbing the schematics from the panicking couple and making a run for it while the raiding party battled for their lives. Struggling with remorse for his cowardice, he gave them to Vee and stayed on in Tenpenny Tower, helping her run the business as they developed new weapons together. The two traveled the wastelands together, overseeing shipments and meeting business partners abroad. Vee had inherited her parents’ savvy, cutthroat business sense, though her good looks helped in getting a little more out of her business partners. While already having grown up learning to use the guns that her parents produced, Frank taught her how to survive in the wastelands.

Time passed, and Vee, plagued by the thought that perhaps her parents or other survivors of the raiding party were still alive, trapped in the tunnels, decided to journey inside to see for herself. Frank, still regretful for abandoning her parents, wouldn’t let her go alone, and they hired a group to accompany them. They took their time in the tunnels, Vee checking the remnants of bodies for anything familiar. Eerily quiet, they descended further into the ruins, their group breaking up more as the hours passed. Vee, thinking she recognized in a fallen form the distinctive logo of their company that her parents’ outfits bore, splintered off but distracted, failed to notice a glow that was coming from a nearby tunnel. The glow became impossible to ignore, and she turned towards it confused, to see a glowing ghoul hissing at her. She screamed, the ghoul threw forth a blast of glowing radiation, and she fell unconscious.

When she woke, Frank told her that the party had heard her scream and brought down the glowing ghoul and it’s feral companions, with a couple of casualties, and taken Vee back to safety. While she had recovered, the flesh of her right arm seemed to be healing very slowly.

The two continued their business together over the years, married, but were unable to conceive. As they grew old together, Vee didn’t seem to show as much signs of age, though the appearance of her right arm never really seemed to heal properly, and the rash seemed to be spreading slowly.

Over time, Vee realized what she was becoming, but kept it a secret from those around her, hiring expert plastic surgeons in confidence to graft new skin and maintain her look, though it also seems to eventually take on the rotting of her own decaying flesh.

Frank died in his early 50’s from a bad heart, Vee doting upon him in his last few fading years of fragility. She put a close partner in charge of the business, Marcus Ramesh, maintaining long distance contact, and traveled out anonymously into the wastelands, knowing that as she continued to grow older she wouldn’t be able to keep her transformation into ghoulhood a secret, and quite conceivably many of her business associates, as shallow, ruthless and prejudiced against ghouls as her family had been, would either pull out or altogether try to take it from her. She wandered the wastelands, sometimes hiring herself out as a mercenary, sometimes falling into recluse for periods of time, musing over her future. She occasionally uses her business contacts to make long distance deals, and has taken up an assistant, Cristian Ramesh, son of Marcus Ramesh, in the last few years, who follows her, organizes her affairs, and performs many cosmetic surgeries for her, the only one to know of her affliction.

After decades wandering the wastelands, she hears news of Greyditch’s oncoming development and hopes to settle down, at least for awhile, tired of traveling. She keeps her former identity a secret and goes by a fake last name, Winters.

Name:
Cristian “Cris” Ramesh

Age:
38

six:
Male

Basic physical appearance and attributes:
Cris is tall, of average build, with a strong nose that looks like it may have been broken a few times, yet fine boned features. He is of half Persian and half German descent, with olive skin and shoulder length wavy black hair. His glasses hide his startling blue, calculating eyes. He’s not particularly strong or athletic, and doesn’t really look at all intimidating. He is usually well-shaven and looks quite put together.

He wears black leather pants and boots, a faded black button down shirt underneath a leather vest and armlets, and over it all, a dusty brown cowl with goggles and several pouches of instruments and supplies.

Weapons and armour:
Combat shotgun
Frag grenades, bottlecap mines
Leather Armour
A good supply of chems; Stimpaks, Antidotes, Rad-X, etc

Personality:
Cris is best described as intense and very intelligent. He comes across as somewhat cold and distant, arrogant, sarcastic, with minimal expression. To Vivienne and the few he trusts, he is thoughtful, extremely loyal and compassionate. To patients he can be a bit cold or a bit compassionate, depending on his mood or the situation. Unlike his parents, he carries no particular prejudices against ghouls or anyone specifically. He’s a very organized, logical person, with excellent memory and a good knowledge of anatomy and physiology. His coordination is good, with a precise touch, and is also decently skilled with explosives and traps. Cristian enjoys the adventure of the wastelands, and while not specifically reckless, doesn’t shy away from danger. He has no moral issues with dealing chems, even harshly addictive ones, on a small scale. He is minorly addicted to Mentats himself, especially at work, and drinks a little bit more than he should. He also dislikes overtly masculine/macho types and can become rather petty, a hangup left over from his father.

Occupation:
Retired mercenary
Assistant to Vivienne Winters, medic/doctor

Faction:
Greyditch

Backstory:
Cristian was born into a wealthy family residing in Tenpenny Towers. His father Marcus, a tough business man in the employ of Vivienne Sommers, worked closely with the heiress and her husband developing and dealing weapons. His mother Elisa was very intelligent, if somewhat coldly distant, and was a skilled doctor and plastic surgeon. Growing up, Cristian took more interest in his mother’s trade than emulating his brawny, intimidating father. He and his father never grew particularly close, as it was generally understood that Marcus had hoped for a tougher, brasher son to join him in the weapons business. When he was 15, Vivienne’s husband Frank died and soon after, she put Cristian’s father Marcus in charge of the company and disappeared to “work abroad”. Marcus and his family were loyal to the Sommers family, and kept the company under control, quelling usurpers and maintaining the business. Vivienne maintained irregular long distance contact with the Maresh family, her communications brief, forwarding a new business contact, advising for certain business decisions, etc.
Unbeknownst to Vivienne, Cristian’s mother Elisa alone suspected the heiress’ ghoulish affliction and though she had always been as prejudiced as everyone else in Tenpenny Towers, seemed to take pity on the long-time family friend in her old age, though they were never particularly close. Elisa trained Cristian as a doctor and when he was 20, sent him after Vivienne in the wastelands to be her assistant. She told him of her suspicions, and sent him to be a comfort to the widowed Vivienne, to slow her progress into ghoulhood.
Cristian obeyed his mother’s wishes, eager to leave Tenpenny Towers and see the wastelands for himself. Knowing that she had been residing in Rivet City for a short while, he made the journey with the help of a hired escort and did indeed find her there, living a secluded life apart from the other citizens. He explained he had been sent as an assistant to her, to maintain her contact with the business and she reluctantly accepted his company. Only much later did he broach the subject of her affliction, offering his acceptance of it, and assistance as her aide.
Cristian had grown up admiring his father’s employer, the beautiful and stylish Vivienne, and as an advlt was happy enough to become warden to the ailing heiress, especially since this allows him to travel. As the years passed, they moved from city to city together, taking the odd mercenary job here and there, and Vivienne eventually began to trust Cristian, letting him take care of her affairs and occasionally using his skills as a surgeon to help her maintain her human appearance.
Now that Vee is looking to settle down for awhile in Greyditch, Cris is content to follow her, and set up shop as doctor if there is space for one.