Tales grow in the telling...

Now that's she's been fully introduced, I want to talk about the character of Sarah Cobbler.

When we did the Virginia Beach VtM campaign way back in college in 1994 or so, I needed to fully populate my newly created city. Either lacking a certain creativity or being lazy or both, I pulled out my Vampire: The Eternal Struggle cards (then still called Jyhad) and found one of my favorite vampires...

This cheap little Tremere vamp was a solid food-soldier in my VTES deck, only 4 blood to play with advanced Thaumaturgy. So I included her as an NPC in my VtM game. (Lazarus, another VTES card, also got brought in as the soon to be demised Prince.)

I didn't really do much with her at first, but I always liked this character. Her potent abilities in the VTES game matched up with her intriguing youthful purple-haired appearance provided by artist Daniel Gelon made her stick in my mind as someone I wanted to make further use of in the future.

So, when I was in grad-school in 1999 and dusting off my campaign notes for the first Philly by Night campaign, I brought Sarah back. She would be part of Michael's coalition to invade Philly and she became a major player in the plot of that campaign.

After another ten or so years had passed and I decided to put proverbial pen to paper to write down all these stories I'd created for these games as a web novel, I needed to create a reason and a rationale for why Sarah would attach herself so closely to Michael's cause.

So, she joined the cadre of Michael's many and various lovers, secondary as they all were to Rebecca and Deborah. I also had to convert her over from VtM to VtR, so she shifted from Tremere to Ventrue. That opened another subplot avenue in that she would be a childe of Ernie. Her knowledge of the occult remained and that gave me my context to introduce her and Michael. Voila, a reasonably well developed side character for the story.

But I wasn't done.

No, there was Dance in the Vampire Bund and that sneaky and potentially risky idea to introduce something of a lolicon character into the story. Sarah was the perfect fit for that experiment. So she went to being really youthful, as in early teen youthful.

Now, I'm fully aware this road has been trod before by far-more famous and accomplished authors. Anne Rice did an exceptional job of weaving together the love story of Louis and Claudia in Interview With a Vampire, an adult male with a child female, both vampire and both far older than their appearance otherwise suggests. But in Rice's universe, vampires are essentially sexless, so their romance was chaste. That would not be the case with Sarah and Michael in my own story. And I knew that would be risky.

But I still wasn't done. No, the story had taken on a life of its own. As Sarah became more developed as a character, it became obvious that the plot was demanding that she be more than a mere throw-away conquest. The logical next step was to make her into a true romantic counterpart to our anti-hero. Now she would be an equal to, or even perhaps supplant, Rebecca and Deborah in Michael's heart.

What would that mean for the story?

Well, I'll leave that part unspoiled, as I've not posted it (or even written all of it) yet. Suffice to say thought I'm very amazed at what has happened with this single character. She went from functional window dressing to potentially the most important side character in the whole story. I never expected that, but that's part of the fun of doing this. Sometimes, these things truly take on a life of their own.

I'll leave you with her Sims 3 portrait. This'll be the last of the Sims 3 character pics that I've done on my own. All future pics will either be "borrowed" from others or created in Sims 2.

Not quite the same as the VTES card, but maybe I'll give her purple hair back in the future. Who knows with this character?