President Vladimir Roth

President Vladimir Roth is a character in The BATTLE of the CENTURY.

Description:
Vladimir is pretty much the image of an archetypal vampire. He has incredibly pale skin, jet black hair and a widow’s peak hairline. He typically wears a loose fitting white shirt with long bishop sleeves, delicate white gloves, black waistcoat and trousers and on top of all this a floor length black cape with an oversized collar. The cape is inlaid with crimson and as he walks it billows out behind him. He has the look of someone who was once attractive and who still could be given a certain light. His features are sharp and only slightly marred by age. There is something striking about him, something that draws you into those steely grey eyes. Also prominent fangs. You can’t miss them.

Vladimir holds an unshakable belief that vampires are just plain better than humans. The best way to describe his attitude towards humans is that he considers them obsolete. He is not the kind of person to be evil for the sake of it, he is someone who wants to make the world better and he thinks he can do it by putting the power into vampiric hands. Or, well, actually he already did that. He is ambitious, resourceful and above all patient. Though he walks the street in the most clichéd vampire outfit anyone has seen he did not always do this, he did not take control of the world by force. He was subtle; he was patient, infecting a person here and there, slowly tipping the balance in the vampires’ favour. Nowadays he is a little arrogant, and he’s kind of let himself go a bit; too much blood and too many bitches, but he figures he’s probably earned it.

Items/Abilities:
Vladimir is a vampire. He has the ability to sire further vampires through a process where he ingests some of their blood and they ingest his. This leaves that person painfully incapacitated for a couple of hours and when they wake up they are a vampire. Vampires that he sires are inherently inferior to him, they lack some of the abilities that he has and importantly they lack the ability to sire vampires of their own. Should they try the victim will become a near-mindless slave that is colloquially known as a ghoul.

As a vampire Vladimir has superhuman strength and agility, the ability to recover quickly from any non-fatal injury, limited shapeshifting (either into mist or a small colony of bats), and a weak hypnotic influence over the weak-willed. But there are numerous downsides to being a vampire, the most obvious of which is the need to ingest blood to survive. Other weaknesses include: direct sunlight (it does not cause a vampire to burst into flames but they will get sunburnt very quickly and it will be really uncomfortable/hurt like hell dependant on how bright a day it is), religious symbology (though it is the conviction and the faith with which they are wielded that does the damage not the symbol itself), garlic (a mild inconvenience), holy water (very painful though rarely deadly), an inability to enter someone’s home unless invited, a wooden stake through the heart (not permanently fatal, the vampire in question will be rendered unconscious up until such time as some foolish kids remove the stake from his corpse), fire and decapitation. Out of all of these decapitation and fire are the only ways to kill a vampire permanently.

Vampires lack both reflections and shadows. They do not show up in photographs or video footage (though any sounds they make or things they say are perfectly audible). They lack a heartbeat and do not need to breathe, though they generally do so out of habit. They have no body heat and are generally at room temperature or perhaps slightly colder though they don’t really feel the heat. Vampires age at a much slower rate than humans.

Biography:
Vladimir remembers little of his time spent as a human and he’s perfectly fine with that. Unlike most vampires his transformation was not the result of being sired but of drinking from a powerful blood magic ritual known as the Font of Sin. This fountain is the well from which all vampiric power springs, and the further removed a vampire is from it, the less powerful they are. Vladimir stumbled across it by accident. It was a stupid dare gone wrong; he did not seriously believe that this book of magic spells he had got from his local library held any truth, not did he believe that the ritual he performed would do anything more than make him nauseous and win him the respect of his friends. It did that but of course it did so much more.

A more mature man might have seen what he had become and despaired for he had become a monster. Vladimir was still a teenager and he thought being a vampire was cool. He convinced his friends to drink from the Font of Sin and they formed their own little vampire clan. They used their powers to do cool, if not very practical things and things seemed to be going okay for a while. Everything went wrong when one of his friends was caught drinking the blood of stray animals (slightly more ethical than drinking the blood of innocent people?) and they were hunted down. Though Vladimir tried to save his friends, he was unsuccessful. In the end he was forced to flee his hometown by himself, the only survivor of his ‘clan’.

The experience of losing his friends (no, they were more than his friends. They were his brothers, they had been more of a family to him than his actual family who had turned upon him when they found out what he was) matured Vladimir. It made him bitter and it made him wary. He saw the world in a new cruel light. Though part of him wanted to return to his hometown and get vengeance, he knew, even back then, that this would not accomplish anything save for putting himself in more danger. It was at this point in his life he began to see how the world really was and how it should be. It seemed obvious to him that vampires were so much better than the humans who had persecuted and killed his clan just because they were different. It was as though the world was out of balance and only he could see it; that the strong would have to hide their strength from the weak, it was preposterous. He decided then that this imbalance would have to be corrected.

To put his kind in their rightful place above the humans he knew that he would have to bide his time. He knew that he would have to be clever, that to try to take the world by force would be a foolish endeavour. He would not try to seize power in a day or a month or even a year. He would be slow and subtle; siring those in positions of power, until eventually one day they would be in charge and the masquerade could be dropped and finally humans would be put in their place.

And so he did. It took him the better part of several centuries to do so but eventually he managed to ingratiate vampires into governments across the world, into militaries and police forces and any other positions of power that he deemed necessary. Finally the vampires revealed themselves and Vladimir named himself President. It was not an easy transition. Those humans were so stubborn in their insistence not to become cattle; slaves of their vampire lords, but what could they do. There was conflict, there was blood spilled but it was too little and too late. He had prepared well and the vampires’ grip was too strong to be broken. The humans were eventually forced to accept their new position in life and Vladimir was able to relax having achieved everything he had ever wanted. Still, upon occasion he would find himself listless, wishing that perhaps there was some new goal for him to reach for, but knowing that there was not.