International Police Organization Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense

From: Vampiric and Lycanthropic Studies Department
To: Director Thomas Manning
Re: Examination report: Subject 2410061501
Date: Thursday 23 June 2410

Dr. Manning:

As requested, I have performed a full examination of the interesting item brought to us last week by the Chief. My findings are as follows:

It is my judgment that the initial investigation team's preliminary assessment was correct: Subject 2410061501 is a human female true vampire (Homo sapiens sanguivorensis). Baseline genetics, despite some muddling thanks to the strange interference of Detian factors (which is entirely outside my area of expertise), indicate that she is almost certainly of Earth origin. Her paragenetic signature, coupled with the Chief's report on her apparent capabilities during the Otonashi Mountain incident, suggests that she is not very far descended from the source of the sanguivorus curse - not very far at all.

I base this conclusion primarily on the following factors:

- She is entirely unharmed by sunlight exposure. Naturally, in her current comatose state it is impossible to tell whether sunlight reduces her supernatural powers, as is the case with almost all true vampires (even the great Dracula himself was said to be little stronger than a mortal man under full sunlight), but the fact that it does her no injury is indicative of a specimen within two generations of the source. Not for nothing are such vampires known among our kind as "daywalkers".

- Her blood has proven to be extremely corrosive to the various lesser vampire and pseudovampire tissue samples I've tested it against. This is a trait that has only been observed in vampires of the first through third generations.

- Physiologically, she shows none of the signs of curse degeneracy normally associated with the more distant generations. Her appearance is entirely normal, without any of the disfigurements common to some of the later branches of the vampiric family tree (such as my own, which can be traced to the seventh generation). Her current deep hibernation state precludes biological function assessment, but high-resolution molecular resonance scanning indicates that all her internal organs are healthy and complete, not atrophied or vestigial as they are in the "more dead" undead (so to speak). (Caveat: This may be a side effect of her unusual reaction to Detian blood, not an actual feature of her manifestation of the sanguivorus curse. Further study is necessary.)

Since she is unconscious, her response to religious symbols cannot be tested, nor can it be determined whether she finds garlic repugnant (I can say that it, like sunlight, does her no physical harm). Naturally, as a true vampire she is indifferent to silver; that weakness is, as you know, confined to certain inferior pseudovampire strains, such as persons infected with the Human/Near-Human Vampirism Virus.

So much for what science can tell us.

Since we're leaving the realm of science anyway, I must tell you that I dislike the constant, clinical references to her by subject number in our documentation, as if she were just another artifact or hideous dead thing brought in for us to pull apart and study. She is, after all, a sapient being, deserving of respectful handling, and she told the Chief her given name. If a full name is required for some bureaucratic reason, perhaps the name of the region where she was found will suffice for a surname until we learn otherwise.

As to lore, there is precious little to go on in that department. Historical references to true vampires are always difficult to find and harder to authenticate - by our very nature, we have spent most of history hiding from mortal notice and mortal scribes. What's worse, the changes in Miss Otonashi's appearance wrought by her strange reaction to the Chief's blood make image matching almost impossible. If, by chance, she was photographed at some point in the past, it was with a face she no longer possesses, so to speak. At any rate, she's a true vampire, so she would have to have been photographed before her turning in the first place.

One of the two promising reference Miss Fleming and I were able to find comes from the records of the Order of St. Dumas, a now-defunct order of Catholic fanatics who primarily preyed on members of other religions, but also dabbled in monster hunting from time to time. Their scribes recorded an encounter between one of their "avenging angels" and a youthful female vampire in French Indo-China in 1887. Given her Asian appearance and the incident's proximity to Japan, the Dumasite in question took her for a jikininki, but his account of her capabilities and actions leaves very little doubt in my mind that his encounter was with a daywalker. I do not know for certain that this was Miss Otonashi, but the parallels with the Chief's encounter of last week are striking, and practically speaking, how many early-generation vampires resembling Japanese teenagers can there be?

The other reference, which Miss Fleming extracted from some ancient database on Earth, is in an incident report from a United States Air Force base in Japan that dates back to 1962. A person answering Miss Otonashi's description (and registered under the name "Saya" at the base secondary school, no less) apparently caused quite a ruckus there; the details are sketchy and were partially redacted in the typical government fashion of the time, but if one reads between the lines, a picture emerges of a daywalker tracking and destroying chiropterans like the one involves in last week's incident.

From these references and certain markers in her base genetic profile, I believe Miss Otonashi was turned in the mid-1800s, which, if my other surmises are also true, would likely make her the last "original" in more ways than one. The Demonology Department's seers do not believe the Lord of Blood has visited the mortal plane since 1865, when he was banished back to Muspelheim by Abraham Lincoln.

To summarize: I concur with the initial team's analysis. I am certain that this "young" woman is a true vampire of Earthborn stock, almost definitely pre-Contact in origin - and I strongly believe she is a first-generation sanguivore. She is very possibly the last surviving first-generation vampire.

More than that, for the moment, I cannot say. Mortal and vampire lore alike contain virtually no references to this creature, which, I must tell you, piques my curiosity inordinately. I devoutly hope she regains consciousness soon, so that I may begin the debriefing process with all due haste. I long to know how so significant a member of my race has gone unnoticed and unrecorded for so long, and how she came to be on the trail of a chiropteran in the mountains of Tomodachi last week.

Respectfully submitted,
Maximilian Friedrich Wilhelm Schreck Graf von Orlock
Deputy Director, Vampiric and Lycanthropic Studies

I loved the reference to Shadowrun's brand of vampirism as inferior, too--it reasserts its actual supernatural, rather than pseudoscientific, origins.

"They say one should not speak unkindly of the dead, so I say, 'nice try'." --Lezard

Sorry, watched Batman Returns recently so this just brings up the mental image of The Walken with big white hair...