biography
It's a stupid thing to not really remember much about family life and to only be as old as Vita is, and there are times when she feels badly about it. But as a whole, her start in life seems like a far away story that she doesn't pick up very often to recount it. She was born where the mouth of the Volga river met the Caspian Sea and, well, it was cold. It was cold and she was a pale little thing, her mother told her time and time again, and if she didn't eat she would grow more pale. This was the conversation that was had over a very lavish dinner... of her father, or the person she came to know as her father - it was probably his own fault, coming to suspicion when his wife and her daughter didn't exactly age the way the rest of the village had. She remembered her mother's bright red hair and the way that her eyes were greener than the leaves on flowers or the eyes of a witch's cat. They weren't from around there, her mother often told her about the coves and caves she'd lived in off of the coast and how the waves crashed just the right way, sometimes so well that men would swim and be brought up to them like offerings onto the beaches. And at the time, it sounded wonderful to her tiny ears. Her mother painted amazing pictures with her words, her voice - which sounded low and soft like the rumbling of the earth when it was warm and happy with the way things had turned for the day.

It was a strange thing, her mother didn't really send her out to kill anyone alone for a very long time. Things were brought to the house, it was all in the guise of normal dinners, normal holiday affairs up until she was around fifteen. Fifteen and growing and hungrier than she'd ever imagined she'd been in her whole life - and her mother had two minds of it. She wasn't ready to let her out on her own, she wasn't ready for the possibility of her little girl stalking off in the night and possibly being beheaded, possibly being had, possibly being spirited away by Gods only knew. Her mother had her shrines, she had smudges, she wasn't an overly religious person, being alive as long as she had - there were too many times that the divine never really bothered showing themselves, but. But there were just sometimes when it was a last ditch thing, besides, if she and her mother, and her daughter were made of magic - then maybe there was. Which is why the first night after her birthday, her mother sent her on her way into the cold night.

To say that she took to it like a duckling took to water would have been a lie, she wasn't bad - but it was messy and there was a kind of remorseful tinge that she wasn't anticipating. There had been a man in the market who eyed her too many times when she came with her mother to get milk, she felt badly, he had a family. A family that he beat, but a family none the less. It wasn't hard, though. Sitting near where the forest met the village on a big rock with the night sky open and starry. She sat on the rock and she sang, she sang the lullaby about a wolf coming from under the bed - her voice lilted through the breeze while her toes flexed on the rock. She was cold and she was waiting, maybe an hour before eventually he came, clean and stinking and hungry in the not-quite frost, looking for Vita. She remembers all of this part exceptionally well, the way his mouth was dry and he kissed her feet, the way he answered her when she asked him why he beat his wife and children and the stink of the worst moonshine on his breath. Her teeth became sharp and his blood spilled over the green grass, he tasted old and tough, but it was enough, more than for her. She'd left his belongings with what was left of his body, his widow would collect them in the day when someone found him after wandering out with their dogs. and Vita would ask her mother if she gained any color.

Staying with her mother for another decade or two, Vita saw most of the west there, enduring the harsh colds and the ice and people blaming monsters and wolves in the night when things were particularly lean. But the water was close and they were mostly safe. But eventually she had to make her way out in the world, her mother's reluctance showing in the way that she grew her nails long after the fact - if she ever came back, they'd probably get lodged in her from the hug and she'd never leave again. But that part of the story wasn't for a while.

She kicked around Eastern Europe for a long while, learning languages, people, how to dance and what to say to someone in the dead middle of the day to make them hungry for the next time she looked their way. And, all things considered, it was a fun time. That and the pastries - those might have been her favorite things after the music. All of the music, folk music, classical, she especially enjoyed the music of the Romani (admittedly that was more of what she learned from where she'd grown, but still. Still.) and the Celts.

There were always sailors, her mother had been right. There were always men on coming and going, staying for a weekend and leaving straight after. Men looking for whiskey or wine or bread and a comfortable bed (or in some cases, a blocked off alleyway) so getting by wasn't all that difficult. Vita found work in dance halls, she learned how to write long ago, but found herself turning to keeping vague journals about how her life was going somewhere around the time she'd been 230 ish. She was asked to be an artist's model, there was something very appealing to being considered a muse. It was entertaining and fun - something that maybe touched on the magical part of her without having to bother with covering up a body. There were suitors, of course, but Vita hadn't ever really considered marrying anyone for the longest time. Not with all her moving around, not with what she had to do, or else she'd be pale, brittle and unlovable. She fancied people, there were men that she'd taken shines to, but it was something she never actively pursued - for any number of reasons. Oh, but the idea of being in love, that was something she'd daydreamed about.

There were sparks of interest to go see the new world after it'd been settled, after the Civil War, when there were cowboys and a weird sepia tinted romanticism that swayed over people when they talked about going out West, but, it just couldn't compare with France, which was where she stayed for the majority of her time. New names, new styles, new people to be, nearly always.

That all changed in the 1900s, the Jazz age had happened in a big way and Vita couldn't help stealing herself away to the new world over the sea to find what kind of new lives people were trying to lead - she fell in love with the new art, the new writing, the way people wanted something again. And for a while, she was quite happy to be that something. For all her traveling and her saving, she had a nice little nest egg and never looked more than 'just old enough' to be entertaining to the right kind of person, a wide eyed innocent way that she'd trained herself to look drew more people than she'd like to admit or think about later in life. America was strange, it was backward and the women were learning to bleach out their hair and line their eyes with black velvet. It was quite a time to be alive.

She loved the East coast with all of it's made up accents and terribly well to-do vagabonds and she wanted to spend the days until her death (whenever that may have been) in New York with all it's bustle and interest and different sorts of people with all the kinds of lives a person could hear about. But she couldn't stay, not forever - and in her heart she knew that. Eventually, she'd started to move and bustle herself, along the coastline, meeting the cold, greenish Atlantic waters with a happy song to just herself. She went down south, she met people who made sweet tea and had sugar and spiced pecans, it was lovely and warm and orange all the way down that land. There were mountains that were terrifying, and further there were bears and reptiles that were bigger than just about anything.

Vita kept to herself from 1942 until the late 60's, traveling all over the continent in between those times. She collected roadside side-show stuff, loving the weird things that people decided to pawn off as the real thing (one of her very favorites being a taxidermied Jackalope she'd gotten in Texas forever ago), when there were real weirdnesses all around humans at any given time. Though, though, she'd only ever managed to run into other non-human sorts maybe three times in her life that she knew of. In fact, she'd gotten away with her life without much fighting or being found out of any kind - and she had always attributed that to her mother's teaching her how to hide in full view, maybe something liked her somewhere.

Of course, once she'd settled into the West coast, she fell in love fast with the whole thing. How up near the top, there were dark green forests and rain for days and the farther down you went the bluer the ocean became and the softer the sand felt under her feet. She would always want to end her days in New York, but Vita would fall under the same kind of spell her voice would ring around people when she'd met California. The colors were brighter and the people were so very strange. Alone and lonely in a place where everyone wanted to be seen, hunting was the easiest but it also made her the saddest there. Another eventually, she settled around Nevada in the dry air. It was, possibly, stranger than California and Texas - but not unpleasant, deciding to become a showgirl for a little longer than she'd initially planned, making friends with the other women and the performers - then using a cultivated talent from years of trying to make her own things, she'd started making and helping with costuming for various acts and people she felt could use her added extra little punch (she loves rhinestones, maybe a little too much).

Now that she lives in Vegas, Vita found a quiet studio apartment where she can perch and watch out of a large window the people who go back and forth. She likes wandering around record stores and has been trying to learn how to play the guitar for the better part of 60 years, trying to write love songs on her lunch breaks but generally it all just sounds like storytelling.