Meet the Cast

As the Central Protagonist, Aurora is the most developed character. She comes from an ancient medieval family in Austria. Every hundred years, a person born into the family is chosen to become a vampire and maintain the centuries of dominance the family has over the local population of humans. In BSS’s universe,different vampires have their own political beliefs about Human-vampire relations. The Von Grabens hold the opinion that Vampires are meant to rule over Humans and have no moral responsibilities, exercising restraint only out of pragmatic necessity. The family was at the height of its power in the years leading up to World War 1, but were affected by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The Von Graben chosen at the start of the 20th century wrongly assumed that an alliance with the Nazi Party would bring about a Von Graben renaissance, but obviously the outcome of World War 2 drove the family even further into debt and obscurity. When Aurora was born in the late 90’s, her strong tempermant was recognized and she was chosen and named in the hopes that she would bring about a New Dawn for the Von Graben name. Unfortunately, Aurora proved to have far stronger a character than anticipated. She was groomed her whole life to become a vampire and political leader, but when she was finally converted and put to her first test (first kill), she ends up running off and fleeing to America in her father’s WWI fighter plane. She is determined to make a life for herself away from the wealth/privelege and expectations of her family, determined to prove her parents wrong and survive away from home without killing anyone. Aurora’s decision to leave home is ultimately my Short’s inciting incident. Aurora’s hidden desire is to find out if she really is the monster that her parents tell her she is. Her biggest fear is the loss of autonomy, and the reality that her parents may be right about her. Her major flaw is that she cannot accept people for who they are, relating to her struggle to accept herself.

While Aurora is a young fledgling vampire adjusting to her new life, Byron is one of two older vampires who are stuck in an un-dead end job and an unresolved interpersonal conflict. Lord Byron is THE Lord Byron, having become a vampire around 200 years ago, ultimately deciding to fake his own death at the age of 38 to avoid suspicion. Out of all the vampire characters in the short, he is one of the oldest. His main dimension is that he appears very young but acts like an old man. Unlike all the other characters, he actually became a vampire by choice. He has gone through multiple identities, attaching himself to many different social movements throughout history, and has major abandonment issues from all the relationships that he has started and ended over his lifetime. He is hardened but charismatic, ultimately trying to become a better person but living with extreme guilt. His biggest fear is to be alone with himself. Like Aurora, Byron originally possessed great wealth and land at multiple points in history, but at the end of World War 2 he ultimately lost everything he had and was forced to start over in America with nothing to his name. It was there, in 1949 that he met Curtis (next page). When Aurora meets him (in the Short), he is trapped in a 9-5 job with Curtis working in the Blood Sugar Shakes food truck. In addition to serving customers as a cashier, he also moonlights as a traveling Drag Queen performing “advertisements” for the Food Truck with elaborate one-man shows in public spaces. The tragedy is that he loves to Drag but is only able to do so in order to promote his “real job”. His hidden desire is to save up enough money to start his own Drag Club, though those dreams have been jeopardized by his landlord driving up the rent and the recent wave of conservatism condemning drag shows in public, dredging up painful memories of the oppression he experienced living in Pre-WW2 Berlin when the Nazis cracked down on the city’s LGBT Night Life.

Curtis is Byron’s closest friend and co-worker at Blood Sugar Shakes. While Byron works the reg ister, Curtis puts the orders of Milkshakes and (blood) together for customers. His primary dimen sion (in direct contrast to Byron) is that he appears as an Old Man but acts like a teenager. He first met Byron in Hollywood in 1949 when he was a young man working in the B-Movie industry as a Monster Prosthetics artist. The two were close friends Curtis’s whole life and he was con verted into a vampire by Byron just as he was about to die of old age in the hospital. The problem was, it was against his wishes. Curtis had explicitly informed Byron that he wanted to live and die naturally as a human, and was not interested in immortality, even if it meant leaving Byron be hind in death. Byron initially accepted this, but at the very last moment, his selfish nature got the better of him and he simply couldn’t bear to lose the one true friend he believed he had. When the deed was done, Curtis had to fake the natural death that he wished for and left his life and family behind, fleeing California with Byron for the East Coast to start a new life under a new name (Curtis Fisher was not his given name) and embark the very long process of trying to forgive Byron for what he had done. One of Curtis’s main dimensions is that he’s Good Natured and Easy Going but is living with deep Resentment toward the person he loves most, and doesn’t know how to process the betrayal that he’s experienced. His biggest fear is the concept of eternity, and his hidden desire is to die (with the irony being that he cannot).

The least developed of the four main characters, Taika is a local of the suburban town in which Aurora crash lands her plane and comes to meet Byron and Curtis. He became a vampire when he was a small child in the 1970’s, and he experienced a strange mutation when he went through puberty which involved his head transforming into that of a Bat. Conversely, when he transforms into his vampire bat form, he has the head of a human. Unlike Aurora, Curtis, and Byron who were all brought up in loving families, Taika developed in an environment of chaos and neglect. He was born to a teenaged single mother and lived in his grandmother’s decrepit townhouse in the inner city. His conversion took place one night when his parents threw a house party while his grand mother was in the hospital. He was left asleep in the “coat room”. A wasted vampire wandered in and simply thought it would be “funny” to bite a child that small. Taika’s transformation was not well received by his family, particularly his grandmother who was a conservative Greek Christian. He was ultimately thrown out of the house when the Bat head transformation took place, and came to live in an abandoned arcade on the edge of the city. His living space becomes a veritable time capsule of 80’s pop culture and obsolete technology as he primarily spends his nights sifting through people’s trash. The turning point in Taika’s young life comes when he decides to hiber nate in his bat form and ultimately sleeps for forty years, only waking up when Aurora stumbles on him during her quest for blood. Taika’s main dimension is that he’s Shy and Gentle but is ac customed to an environment of violence and abuse. He desires most to become an Astronaut and visit the moon, though he knows deep down that as a vampire, it is impossible for him to go to space because there will be no protection from the sun.