Annabelle "Little-Lantern" McCabe





=•History•=

White Picket Fences
Annabelle McCabe was born to a simple enough family in suburban Massachusetts. Well off enough to provide and encourage a private education throughout her childhood and teen years. No secret family histories, no shadows on the streets of her suburb, no eldritch rituals in anyone's basements. What she knew of the Templars came from her history books in high school: a defunct, ancient knightly order.



Life was good and predictable.

What do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
As Annabelle matured and started to think about career paths, she found the work of a doctor suited to her. Specifically, the study of blood and its diseases: hematology. How the very river of life in one's veins could go so very wrong intrigued her.

And so, when the time came she sent out her applications for higher education. As luck would have it, she was accepted over in England of all places. On a whim of a desire for travel, she had applied to a small university outside of London. No Oxford, but certainly more prestigious than the public university in her hometown.

Best Years of Your Life, They Say
College life. The time when everyone says one spreads their wings, the best years. It certainly started out that way for Annabelle, brown-gold eyes wide with wonder at the old stone walls of her campus. Stained with moss, years, and--something else. Something she couldn't see back then, but she felt lay under the age and green fuzz.

Friends were made easily enough after a bout of culture shock. She studied, she celebrated good grades, celebrated to forget less than good grades. Her flat-mate Noria "Transfusion" Dolance was an odd little gem of company.

In the equivalent of her junior year, it was high time she found a practical experience. Something to make her application to medical school shine. Again, fate smiled, for she was accepted to shadow and study under the team ran by the hematology professor that had ended up her mentor.

Experience Necessary
The clinic was average enough, if a little too sterile. Chatter and the clink of equipment echoed off the white walls the tiniest bit out of synch. Enough for the unconscious mind to notice and send the heart into a slight pitter-patter of anxiety and disorientation. Annabelle passed it off as the expected anxieties about her new opportunity.

She shadowed her mentor and his team, along with a couple other students her age she did not know. She was ready to answer any popped questions, and was mostly kept busy with work befitting an intern. She was not let near a syringe, but helped more experienced nurses keep track of patient records and clinic inventory.

This was when she found something wrong.

Missing scalpels, needles, and containers of drawn blood. They did not match up with the lists and numbers. When she questioned this, it was brushed aside, and the numbers quickly smudged or worked over when she wasn't looking. Another thing wheedling at the back of her mind was the basement storage she was not allowed access to. The materials there are too delicate, she was told. Not for a student not yet in proper medical school to touch.

The other students didn't question it much.

Annabelle was getting tired of being gaslighted, however.

Wisdom Flows Sweet, Runs Quick as Blood
Another night, another anxiety laced attempt at sleep. The off-synch echoes, the dismissiveness to her complaints, the glaring white everywhere. While certainly not being driven insane, she was beginning to wake up less and less ready for the day. Perhaps she was trying too hard.

And why were the echoes in the halls starting to buzz?

Her sleep was suddenly interrupted by a burning choking in her throat. She nearly fell to the floor as she scrambled to the bathroom sink in her student flat, throat trying desperately to expell this sweet fire.

Eventually it passed, leaving Annabelle heaving over the porcelein. Breath caught, she took a few large drinks of water right from the faucet, then slumped back to bed.

Her dreams were golden that night.

The next few weeks found Annabelle progressing through her studies with such a fervor and speed thought reserved only for lecturing PhDs. She could almost hear the red life running through the bodies rivers and channels. She could smell the sickness, the cancer, the broken fiberglass of anemia.

And she could speak to it. Not verbally, not with words. But the golden will inside her called to it, and expelled the ills. Or bent them so their victims at least suffered less. Her beginnings of the manipulation of blood-borne illness was simple--no miracle worker, most of the time the disease was only weakened so that the strained immune system got a temporary reprieve.

However, the true issue was she did not know she was doing such. She still shadowed as she had done while here, taking notes, pondering these new veins of thought in her consciousness. The smells, the undercurrent of buzzing in certain lights from the windows. Whatever patient she visited seemed to recover quicker, their skin more flushed.

Her mentor and his associates took notice.

Stains Don't Fade
A few more months passed, with Annabelle more and more attaining her mentor's favor. She was allowed access to medical tomes previously not read. Some old--strangely old. She was not sure why they had a copy of the Chirurgia Magna, but it was insisted she learn the ancient medicinal practices of their predecessors. The elder English script was difficult to wade through, but she wished to please her "colleagues" now that she was really getting ahead.

Then she finally learned where those missing supplies were sneaking off to.

During a typical all-nighter (except with the study of those ancient medical tomes) her mentor and an associate called upon her. They needed help retrieving something in the basement, and trusted her delicate skill with such equipment.

She readily agreed, though she heeded the sudden high-pitched scream of the warm buzzing inside her.

Esorted towards those locked doors, they finally opened. Down a typical stairwell to B1. Then B2. Then B3...B4? How could she have missed that this simple clinic had four basements? It was true the first couple floors underground held equipment and records--nothing extraordinary. The materials on the third floor, however, had her harken back to that warning scream. Industrial refridgerators, all bearing the modern glyph for biohazard. She somehow knew that's where the gathered blood was. Like above, she could smell its chilled cells and sicknesses.

The fourth floor. She does not remember much now--only rusty stains on the concrete in a circle. Terror. A couple patients thought dead, hooked to drainers for their rare blood type. She was asked to draw the inadaquacy out of one, and did so. The cloudy disease sitting in a sphere in her palm, soon absorbed into her skin and eaten by her gold-laced immune cells. Stored. Kept innocuous until later.

Her new talents were deemed useful for the clinicians and their search for power in the dark blood of elder things. For the next months she aided them in a frightened stupor. Manipulating disease and the red flow of life for their ends. Studying their books. Those books got more yellowed and stained. She wondered where the leather of their covers came from.

She gained knowledge, and skill. The clinicians thought it would only be used for them. Never against them. One night, they would find out how wrong they were.



One night a fellow student of hers went missing, and Annabelle was again called to the fourth floor of the basement. She had been found, or rather stored. And it turned out it was her flat mate, Noria. One of the last few pieces for whatever sanguine darkness they were trying to foment, the young woman possessing a desired blood type and purity. She recognized Annabelle, and raspily cried for help through her gag. Annabelle stared at her in blank shock.

Behind her, one of the clinicians screamed as her skin began to bubble with bloody boils. Another fell over, quietly dieing as his immune system attacked his own blood cells, white against red. Muscle atrophied, veins shrunk, or popped. One disease spread to another host, to another.

Annabelle had gotten very tired of the gaslighting.

One by one they fell to the diseases she had stored within her, others she drew out from present corpses. She fell to her knees, coughing up her own red.

She passed out before she saw the padding boots of the Templar agent that had been watching this clinic--and her--for the past few years descend the stairs.

The Red Cross
A year or two more passed after Annabelle was quite willingly recruited into the Templars. The trauma of her her abilities' origin not forgotten, but no longer giving her nightmares. Still a shade in corners of foreign hospitals.

She studied more regulated books, and practiced at a more wholesome clinic under a more righteous doctor, the building adorned with a red cross that was definately not of the IFRC.

She now remains about Eldwich and Temple Hall, providing aid to patients both mundane and magical. Noria, once she recovered, resumed her position as Annabelle's flat mate, though this time their shared residence was near Darkside. Though both friends are happy to reside together, the arrangement was encouraged by the Templar offices to keep an eye on Noria's stability.

When not working, she studies para-hematology and aids more experienced researchers while Noria is off on the field. She often acts as an advisor to her friend. The emails to her parents detail she works at a philanthropic health service. They don't question it much.

=•Appearance•=

Dress
When on the job at the clinic, Annabelle dons a simple and professional black suit set, with a white buttoned shirt and red tie. Black patent heels click on the linoleum floor.

Should she be required to travel, a red turtleneck sweater, brown coat, tough jeans, and brown gumboots keep the natural elements off her.

Whatever outfit she current walks about in, she always has her glasses on. Contacts make her squeamish.

Equipment
Her primary weapon is her old, Templar-given, tome of blood magic. Weathered, worn, containing the basics in its parchment pages. Hers details the particulars of magical disease more than a tome dedicated to throwing blood spikes around might.

Her secondary weapon is a cold-iron longsword. She has a penchant for lining the edges of this blade with her sicknesses, thus spreading them to her foes in a rather direct manner.

Her tertiary armament is a simple revolver pistol. She isn't very skilled with it, but in this modern age, it doesn't hurt to keep around.

=•Personality•= Annabelle McCabe is generally quiet and reserved, though not unfriendly. She just likes to watch a group for a while before she inserts herself. When she has warmed up, associates will find a quick wit and warm, slightly awkward, grin. She tends to put work before closer relationships.

As far as the Illuminati and Dragon go, she doesn't think about it much. She considers it a dance necessary for every party to continue on, that won't ever fade. A bit of a cosmic balance scale, with three plates. Despite her general neutrality, she considers the Templars the best for her for the regulations and more-or-less knightly code of honor. And, well--one saved her.

Her immortality as one blessed by the Gaian bees terrifies her. It is hard for her to imagine what she'll become a century down the line. Or more. This is one reason why she's stayed sequestered in her clinic--the stories of bee-eaters recovering from traumatic injury in a few seconds, bouncing back from death. She isn't so willing to test it.