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[Vampire The Masquerade] Ann notes
Backstory
She was born Ann Margaret Brown in Erie, Pennsylvania on December 3, 1955, the third child of Mary Brown and William Brown. She first gained an interest in medicine after the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963. The then eight year old Ann declared her intention to become a doctor when she grew up, unaware of the different between practicing and research physicians.
Her somewhat conservative parents discouraged her from this choice and encouraged her instead to seek to become a nurse, which they considered a more suitable medical career for a woman. Ann acquiesced to the family pressure, though it became a source of resentment when she grew older. During her time at university, she came to appreciate nursing in its own right, coming to prefer it over becoming a doctor, but she never entirely forgave her parents for their lack of support of her childhood dream. This, alongside other problems between her and her wider family, resulted in her becoming somewhat estranged from the Brown family.
In their place, she made friends during her four years at university, many of them from outside of the College of Nursing, including a couple of older friends from the associated medical school. Though by no means a social butterfly of the campus, she opened up significantly from her more reserved childhood personality thanks to the affection she'd missed from her typically more standoffish family.
After graduation in 1977, she remained in touch with the closest of her friends, especially those who, like her, moved to Pittsburgh in search of work. She roomed with two of those friends -- a doctor who was doing her residency at a different local hospital than where Ann would come to work, and another newly graduated nurse -- and the friends who lived close by remained the core of her friends group even as she made a few more in her new job.
In early spring of 1982, she began to feel like someone was watching her whenever she had an evening or night shift, but neither she nor her friends ever found any evidence of a stalker of any kind beyond her sense that something was wrong, so she couldn't do anything other than avoid being outside alone whenever she could avoid it. A couple of months later, she found out where the feeling came from when a person she'd never seen before walked up to her as she walked home from work, looked her in the eyes, and politely asked her to follow them. That person would become her sire, whose interest was piqued when a human like her showed signs of noticing their presence even through their skills in Obfuscate.
Though she played along with her sire and the local vampire authorities when it came to their rules, she told her roommates what had happened to her as soon as she was able to return to their shared apartment. It was initially a difficult story to believe, but it became a story that was also difficult to disbelieve when Ann was crying tears of blood and nearly met true death on her third morning of unlife when one of her roommates unthinkingly opened the blackout curtains they had purchased.
This story was slowly spread among the most trustworthy of their mutual friends. Some of these resulted in broken friendships, either from the belief that they were being lied to or the decision that the friendship was not worth getting involved with some kind of secret vampire society, but her careful choices in confidants meant that none of them spread the information and she was still left with enough willing supporters to be able to make her way without killing anyone through her first year, and more than enough friends to have someone to comfort her in the lowest moments. As the year wore on, Ann began to think that she could manage this new "life."
One winter evening in late 1982, she came back in the wee hours of the morning from a night shift at the hospital -- the only kind she could do anymore -- to find both of her roommates dead and her sire casually waiting for her on the couch.
Ann had managed to pretend for several months that the people around her were just her herd, but it would not stand up to much scrutiny if a kindred ever cared enough about the quiet and seemingly obedient new kindred on the block. Her sire, eventually looking in on their childe, did not take long to notice that Ann was not, in fact, deceiving all of the humans around her. They felt it would be silly to let their childe lose everything out of some petty sentimentality, so they took care of the problem. You're welcome, by the way. They also forgave their wayward childe's fury frenzy, which got nowhere near actually endangering their life since Ann was certainly not the most powerful vampire in the world. Perhaps they are the sentimental one, they pondered, to be such an indulgent sire.
It would turn out, from her frantic searching before dawn and from the police investigation that followed her report, that everyone still in her circle of friends and a number of offshoots of friends of friends were murdered in a similar way that night. This included one ex-friend who cut her out of their life for their own safety, but got caught up from remaining in contact with a mutual friend of theirs.
She was initially an obvious suspect in the case, but her shift at the hospital gave her an alibi for too much of the night to even have a solid reason to blame her for one of the deaths, let alone all of them. The case remained open for several years until the police eventually got a confession from a different criminal: the police wanted to remove the embarrassment of the uncaught spree killer and the criminal wished to bolster his reputation.
Ann, meanwhile, moved states as soon as the police allowed her to leave as a major witness in the case. She got a job at another hospital and continued her work as a nurse, but she never got close to anyone ever again. She was convinced that she would cause the death of any humans she got too close to, and she now hated all kindred, herself included. She changed jobs two more times, moving to new states in order to make her even less likely to have a dangerous connection to any person, before eventually dropping off the radar as Ann Brown in the mid-90s, reaching her 40s with the face of a 27 year old (if a rather haggard 27 year old when she didn't need to fool medical equipment about her corpse state).
For over a decade, she survived on a combination of her savings (left over from her especially frugal time of doing very little other than quietly feeding her hunger and going to work) and under-the-table work, continuing to not settle in any one place for long before packing up and leaving: not by expensive moving truck, but by packing her few belongings and walking out into the night.
In the first decade of the 21st century, she came to hear from her very limited unavoidable interactions with kindred society of a city that set itself apart from the messy struggles between Camarilla and Anarch. Thoroughly disillusioned with both sects, she eventually made her way quietly to Las Vegas and did her best to settle in without attracting any attention. By now going by Anne Miller, though still without any identification, she tried to scrape by in the City of Lights, having fewer expenses as someone who can't consume food, but by the time she heard of a job in the kindred community that seemed less immoral than the average and paid, she had barely a dollar to her name. Though she hated the idea of getting involved with anything to do with kindred, she felt she had no choice but to apply.
Outline of murder for Buzzfeed Unsolved: True Crime, interspersed with banter in the full show
On November 19, 1982, a Pittsburgh dispatcher for 911 received a phone call from a public phone. A woman's voice comes over the line. "My god, they're all dead. My god, my god, I should have been there." It takes several minutes to calm her down enough to learn much of use, but the dispatcher was able to prompt an address out of her. In fact, he was able to prompt several addresses from her, but since they were all clustered within the same neighbourhood, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police sent two police officers over to the scene while waiting for further information from the distraught woman.
The first address brought them to the unlocked door of an apartment.
She was born Ann Margaret Brown in Erie, Pennsylvania on December 3, 1955, the third child of Mary Brown and William Brown. She first gained an interest in medicine after the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963. The then eight year old Ann declared her intention to become a doctor when she grew up, unaware of the different between practicing and research physicians.
Her somewhat conservative parents discouraged her from this choice and encouraged her instead to seek to become a nurse, which they considered a more suitable medical career for a woman. Ann acquiesced to the family pressure, though it became a source of resentment when she grew older. During her time at university, she came to appreciate nursing in its own right, coming to prefer it over becoming a doctor, but she never entirely forgave her parents for their lack of support of her childhood dream. This, alongside other problems between her and her wider family, resulted in her becoming somewhat estranged from the Brown family.
In their place, she made friends during her four years at university, many of them from outside of the College of Nursing, including a couple of older friends from the associated medical school. Though by no means a social butterfly of the campus, she opened up significantly from her more reserved childhood personality thanks to the affection she'd missed from her typically more standoffish family.
After graduation in 1977, she remained in touch with the closest of her friends, especially those who, like her, moved to Pittsburgh in search of work. She roomed with two of those friends -- a doctor who was doing her residency at a different local hospital than where Ann would come to work, and another newly graduated nurse -- and the friends who lived close by remained the core of her friends group even as she made a few more in her new job.
In early spring of 1982, she began to feel like someone was watching her whenever she had an evening or night shift, but neither she nor her friends ever found any evidence of a stalker of any kind beyond her sense that something was wrong, so she couldn't do anything other than avoid being outside alone whenever she could avoid it. A couple of months later, she found out where the feeling came from when a person she'd never seen before walked up to her as she walked home from work, looked her in the eyes, and politely asked her to follow them. That person would become her sire, whose interest was piqued when a human like her showed signs of noticing their presence even through their skills in Obfuscate.
Though she played along with her sire and the local vampire authorities when it came to their rules, she told her roommates what had happened to her as soon as she was able to return to their shared apartment. It was initially a difficult story to believe, but it became a story that was also difficult to disbelieve when Ann was crying tears of blood and nearly met true death on her third morning of unlife when one of her roommates unthinkingly opened the blackout curtains they had purchased.
This story was slowly spread among the most trustworthy of their mutual friends. Some of these resulted in broken friendships, either from the belief that they were being lied to or the decision that the friendship was not worth getting involved with some kind of secret vampire society, but her careful choices in confidants meant that none of them spread the information and she was still left with enough willing supporters to be able to make her way without killing anyone through her first year, and more than enough friends to have someone to comfort her in the lowest moments. As the year wore on, Ann began to think that she could manage this new "life."
One winter evening in late 1982, she came back in the wee hours of the morning from a night shift at the hospital -- the only kind she could do anymore -- to find both of her roommates dead and her sire casually waiting for her on the couch.
Ann had managed to pretend for several months that the people around her were just her herd, but it would not stand up to much scrutiny if a kindred ever cared enough about the quiet and seemingly obedient new kindred on the block. Her sire, eventually looking in on their childe, did not take long to notice that Ann was not, in fact, deceiving all of the humans around her. They felt it would be silly to let their childe lose everything out of some petty sentimentality, so they took care of the problem. You're welcome, by the way. They also forgave their wayward childe's fury frenzy, which got nowhere near actually endangering their life since Ann was certainly not the most powerful vampire in the world. Perhaps they are the sentimental one, they pondered, to be such an indulgent sire.
It would turn out, from her frantic searching before dawn and from the police investigation that followed her report, that everyone still in her circle of friends and a number of offshoots of friends of friends were murdered in a similar way that night. This included one ex-friend who cut her out of their life for their own safety, but got caught up from remaining in contact with a mutual friend of theirs.
She was initially an obvious suspect in the case, but her shift at the hospital gave her an alibi for too much of the night to even have a solid reason to blame her for one of the deaths, let alone all of them. The case remained open for several years until the police eventually got a confession from a different criminal: the police wanted to remove the embarrassment of the uncaught spree killer and the criminal wished to bolster his reputation.
Ann, meanwhile, moved states as soon as the police allowed her to leave as a major witness in the case. She got a job at another hospital and continued her work as a nurse, but she never got close to anyone ever again. She was convinced that she would cause the death of any humans she got too close to, and she now hated all kindred, herself included. She changed jobs two more times, moving to new states in order to make her even less likely to have a dangerous connection to any person, before eventually dropping off the radar as Ann Brown in the mid-90s, reaching her 40s with the face of a 27 year old (if a rather haggard 27 year old when she didn't need to fool medical equipment about her corpse state).
For over a decade, she survived on a combination of her savings (left over from her especially frugal time of doing very little other than quietly feeding her hunger and going to work) and under-the-table work, continuing to not settle in any one place for long before packing up and leaving: not by expensive moving truck, but by packing her few belongings and walking out into the night.
In the first decade of the 21st century, she came to hear from her very limited unavoidable interactions with kindred society of a city that set itself apart from the messy struggles between Camarilla and Anarch. Thoroughly disillusioned with both sects, she eventually made her way quietly to Las Vegas and did her best to settle in without attracting any attention. By now going by Anne Miller, though still without any identification, she tried to scrape by in the City of Lights, having fewer expenses as someone who can't consume food, but by the time she heard of a job in the kindred community that seemed less immoral than the average and paid, she had barely a dollar to her name. Though she hated the idea of getting involved with anything to do with kindred, she felt she had no choice but to apply.
Outline of murder for Buzzfeed Unsolved: True Crime, interspersed with banter in the full show
On November 19, 1982, a Pittsburgh dispatcher for 911 received a phone call from a public phone. A woman's voice comes over the line. "My god, they're all dead. My god, my god, I should have been there." It takes several minutes to calm her down enough to learn much of use, but the dispatcher was able to prompt an address out of her. In fact, he was able to prompt several addresses from her, but since they were all clustered within the same neighbourhood, the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police sent two police officers over to the scene while waiting for further information from the distraught woman.
The first address brought them to the unlocked door of an apartment.