[V5] Sorcha Alessanda Dunsirn - Meet the Poster Child

 

art by Stephanie's Sketchbook

I didn't "create" Sorcha. Sorcha sort of... happened to me. Now she's here and I can't do anything about it.

The first time I read through the V5 corebook, I reached the section about thinbloods. There was a long-dormant "Scottish party princess" character I'd not quite found the place for, somewhere in the back of my mind. Something about that, and the rise of the e-girl, and thinbloods and alchemy and chemistry and drugs, locked into place in that moment, and suddenly there she was.

Skinny little missy. Shaved head. Underground party planner. Makes her own molly. (She's taken some bad shit and regretted it: at least hers isn't cut with stuff from Lush.) Talented chemist, with a Baccalaureate, but kicked out of school for petty sex-related crimes. The sun never sets on her gap year. To paraphrase a line from a story, attributed to Hatsune Miku, that was knocking around my head for days: "Sorcha is nineteen. Forever." 

And then, because I am all about the Giovanni in my bones - snap, crackle, pop. Thinblood Giovanni. Well, Hecata, in new money. There was no necromancy in the core book? That's fine. She's a thinblood. She came through without the signature power of the family, but she's Scottish, so she's a Dunsirn: if she can make money and influence people she's meeting her tithe and she gets to live. She has a Mawla: her full-fat Kindred father, who may have Embraced her on the night of her overdose, or may have killed the boyfriend/dealer who did and passed her off as his own. With regular infusions of Dad Blood she can pass for a proper Hecata: pity the Bond makes her insane. Dancing around the Giovanni Incest Thing, but exploring it rather than indulging it. Emotional codependency and the Elektra complex.

She proved very, very popular. I started talking about her on the Discord server I inhabited at the time, and "how much for Sorcha to step on me" was a query I heard more times than I'd ever expected. I set her up with an in-character blog on the vampblr scene, and she made a lot of friends (before I fell victim to bleed, and manic depression, and had to step back before I blew up. for the third time in a year).

People like drawing her. Over the years I've commissioned an amount of Sorcha art, but been given as much, which never fails to baffle and delight me. I enjoy writing her, and when the time came to sit down and play V5 for the first time, I had a revelation that completed her.

She didn't have to be my character. I was playing Alistair as a sort of STPC/Mawla figure, the neonate using three confused Toreador fledglings to pursue his own agenda. Sorcha, I realised, would be a fantastic burden to place on them - any time I needed to vamp for a session or two, spin my wheels to figure out what happened next, babysitting this precious, precocious ex-Touchstone. So I asked my partner to sit in, as assistant Storyteller, knowing that the love of my life is a table troll who will commit absolutely to the Bit.

Reader, it was a blast. One night with Sorcha - born-to-be-Kindred Sorcha who knew the ropes but had come to them ten years too young - and she'd roasted the coterie for their many failings, dragged them down Sauchiehall Street looking for her ex and a swift shag in a pub toilet, let them into a secret rave and been slut shamed by three thinbloods she was desperate to impress, and ended the night in tears because she just wanted friends. Absolute carnage. At least one death. Adorable accent. ADHD confirmed.

Sorcha became an on-and-off guest star for the next two years of chronicling. Think of her as the Spike-from-Buffy, in those early seasons: she turns up and the story's all about her for as many episodes as it needs to be. As the rules for Oblivion finally dropped, she started to evolve and grow in that direction, experimenting with necromancy and conceiving of her unlife's great project: jailbreaking the ceremonies and rituals so they work as applied alchemy. Instant Zombie. Shroud-B-Gone. Building off counterfeit Disciplines into something totally other.

It helps that she has a Lasombra-lite friend. Sorcha's online persona, still being written by me, had run into another goth thinblood - lovely, lovely Hazel, seven years older in mortal terms but more or less a twin in Kindred years. Big sister Sorcha never had? Tol/smol lesbian crush? Political partner? Sorcha puts a chunk of her trust fund interest into Hazel's network of safehouses for Duskborn, in return for weird alchemical and occult and shadowy shit Hazel finds or learns on her travels. They've only been in the same city twice. They got wasted, went urban exploring, had an encounter where the veil thins, made a blanket fort, made out, and discovered the meaning of the enigmatic prophecy "pussy god strap."

(Hazel's player is responsible for the commission portrait up top: the cover for Glasgow By Night, you know the vibes. She is also responsible for several more, which I'll add to this post once I get them out of the backup tarball they're sealed into.) 

But Hazel's not forever. Sorcha knows it. She let someone get close once, and it broke her, and now she is a sometimes food, a treat and a surprise, someone she's going to lose or screw over one of these nights. To her total surprise, Hazel's not The One. Chez is.

Charles Hughes. Charlie. Chesterfield. Chez. Cherubim. He goes by many names. He's a Malkavian, barely a breath above thinblood himself. He woke up in Paris with nothing but a packet of Chesterfields in his pocket and some severe flashbacks, and gradually pieced his past together: chav, crimes, youth offender, prison, trafficked, blood doll... and mutilation by the freaks who'd bought him, a Sabbat pack lurking beneath the City of Lights.

When Chez came home to the UK and started making music, he started releasing shorts and reels and such through vampblr.sck, the app and website. And that's how he met Sorcha. And that's how he got invited up to Glasgow for what was going to be a fling and a schooling session... until they took a bunch of acid, bad-trip trauma-bonded in a hotel jacuzzi, and realised they could really help each other out here.

One of these nights, they're going to be a power couple. When Alistair's "plan omega" kicks in and Sorcha has to diablerise her da before anyone else does. Until then, Sorcha dances and deals at Cherubim gigs, and all his best songs are about her. He helped her wean herself off the blood bond; she carried him through the turmoil of his first murder. If this was Revised Edition, it would be True Love (4 dot Merit).