Baz Pitch

f a m i l y
[mother] Natasha Grimm-Pitch. (1965 - 1996). Housewife. Baz doesn’t know much about his mother except what his aunt told him. He misses her regardless, though he’s unsure if he misses her or the idea of her.

[father] Malcolm Grimm. (1962 - ?) Scientist. Baz and his father have a strained relationship because of what happened when Baz was four. Baz doesn’t blame his father, but still thinks that even thinking about experimenting with vampires was an incredibly stupid thing to do. That aside, he doesn’t feel comfortable around his father because he doesn’t accept that Baz is gay; Malcolm prefers to pretend he doesn’t know that about his son. Baz steers clear of him when he can.

[aunt] Fiona Grimm. (1968 - ?) Businesswoman. Despite being Malcolm’s sister, Fiona is probably Baz’ favourite person in the world. She’s ruthless and no-nonsense and thinks she’s better than most other people. She has a wicked sense of humour and a mind that works in mysterious ways. Baz trusts her with his life.

[stepmother] Sarah Grimm-Fowle. (1969 - ?) Housewife. His stepmother is too sweet for their family, Baz thinks. She’s honest, even a bit naïve, who doesn’t like to know about Baz’s peculiarity or homosexuality or anything to do with the unhappy past of the family. Baz doesn’t mind her, but he’s not around her very much.


p e c u l i a r i t y
Technically speaking, Baz’ peculiarity isn’t a peculiarity, since he wasn’t born with it; it was forced onto him when he was four. Because of the way he became a Peculiar, Baz doesn’t like referring to himself as a vampire, though he’ll grudgingly call himself that whenever he needs to explain his powers to someone else. Baz doesn’t share many characteristics with ‘actual’ vampires. He can walk in the sun just fine and isn’t affected by religious symbols (though he likes to pretend that he is, on occasion, just to mess with people). He’s not particularly strong or fast. He’s not sure if he’s actually immortal, since his body still matured after his powers first manifested themselves, but he’s not very keen to find out, content to stay in the loop.

The one thing he does share with other vampires is the fact that he needs blood to survive. If he goes without blood for too long, he starts feeling weak and sluggish, much like someone dying of hunger and thirst. Blood isn’t the only thing he needs, though; just like a regular human, he still needs to eat and drink regular food and water. His body still functions as if would have if he had been human – except for the fact that he’s not susceptible to aches, pains, or illnesses, even the common cold. For some reason, Baz’ vampire blood makes him more susceptible to fire, though he never did find out why.

Because of his vampiric heritage, Baz has the ability to enthral people. It takes up a lot of energy, especially because Baz isn’t actually a full-blooded vampire and can backfire if he doesn’t concentrate enough. He only uses it in a pinch, whenever he’s in danger, so he can escape safely.

tl;dr Baz is a vampire only in the sense of the word that he needs blood to survive and is more susceptible to fire. Otherwise, he’s the same as a regular human, except that he can’t get sick.


l o o k s
Baz is a stick of a boy with long, gangly limbs. He’s fairly tall, which makes him seem even skinnier. He has dark hair that he keeps short along the back and sides but long up top; usually, his longer hair drapes over his forehead. He’s often scowling, which makes his dark eyes flash dangerously. Because of his vampirism, he’s usually very pale, unless he’s just drunk some blood. If he has, his cheeks are rosy, which annoys him to no end, because it makes him look like he’s blushing.


p e r s o n a l i t y
Intelligent. Baz reads – a lot. He’s interested in a great many topics and knows about a great many topics. He has a quick mind that he can apply to most situations. Because of this, he has little patience for people of a lesser intelligence than he and usually avoids conversation with them.

Perseverant. Once Baz has set his mind to something, there’s nothing that can keep him from achieving it. He’ll go above and beyond to achieve his goals, even if he forgets to look after himself while he does so. He always wants to have the last word in a discussion, no matter how nonsensical that word is.

Creative. Baz is creative in more than one sense of the word – he’s a great music lover, though he doesn’t like to admit it, and frequently comes up with his own pieces. He also knows how to turn most situations to his own hand and is quick to come up with a witty response if someone addresses him.

Oblivious. Despite his intelligence, Baz can be a bit dense, especially when it comes to matters related to emotions. He usually doesn’t notice if other people treat him in a certain way or feel certain emotions for him; he often doesn’t even recognise his own emotions except for when he’s angry or annoyed.

Grumpy. Baz just isn’t a people person – or an anything person, really. He dislikes most people and things (or so he thinks) and isn’t shy about making his displeasure known. He’s often heard growling out his answers and glaring at others from across the room.

Snob. The Pitch family is what one would call ‘old money’, and under his aunt’s tutelage, Baz grew up with the knowledge that his family – and he himself by extension – is better than most other people. He treats other people accordingly, which doesn’t make him very likeable, but he doesn’t really care about that; as his aunt taught him, “it’s better to be respected than to be liked.”

Sadistic. He won’t actively set out to harm someone (mostly because he thinks it’s too much effort) but he does enjoy the suffering of others, especially when he doesn’t like them. He doesn’t actually want them to get physically hurt. He merely enjoys their emotional problems (which he thinks are petty) and minor injuries.


h i s t o r y
On a cold, snowy evening in 1989, Natasha Pitch took Malcolm Grimm to dinner at an expensive restaurant and asked him to marry her. They had been courting for several months, per request of their families, and everyone knew it would be only a matter of time before they tied the knot. Everyone on Malcolm’s side of the family had expected Malcolm to be the one to propose; everyone on Natasha’s side knew she would, and that she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Except that Malcolm was so baffled that she had proposed that he did say no. Quite vehemently. Natasha wasn’t deterred, however; she calmly ordered dessert for the both of them and let Malcolm pay for dinner. She let him drive her home and said she’d call him.

The next time they went out, Natasha asked him again. Again, Malcolm said no. Again, Natasha continued their dinner as if nothing had happened. When she asked him a third time, Malcolm exploded, demanding to know why she continued to ask him when it was simply not done for a woman to ask a man. Natasha heard him out and quirked an eyebrow. “You want to marry me but you’re never going to gather the courage to ask, so I’m doing the asking,” she told him. “Just say yes. We both know you will eventually.” Dumbstruck, Malcolm did say yes, and the two were married six months later. Natasha delivered their first and only son, Tyrannus Basilton Grimm-Pitch, a year after their wedding.

Basilton was a happy child who learned to walk and talk quickly and spent nearly all of his time with his mother, who had stayed at home with him while Malcolm continued his career as a scientist. Despite the fact that his wife was a Peculiar (Natasha could control fire) Malcolm worked for a company involved with researching Peculiars – in particular, the company was looking into ways to transfer a Peculiar’s power to a regular person, so that everyone could have some sort of gift and no man would be powerless against Peculiars. Malcolm’s division was, at the time of Basilton’s birth and many years afterwards, tasked with researching vampires.

When Basilton was four years old, Malcolm’s division made a breakthrough in harnessing the powers of vampires and put forward a proposal for experimentation. Malcolm, upon realising this would involve infecting people with vampire blood, tendered his resignation and left his company, taking his funding for the project with him. His fellow scientist and the members of the board overseeing the project were both furious with him for disappearing with what they thought of as their money, and determined to get the project done, so they agreed they would get Malcolm to pay up one way or another, no matter what they would have to do. When Malcolm kept refusing, they looked toward his family – they didn’t dare touch Natasha because she was a Peculiar and there was no telling what she would do, but they found Malcolm’s four-year-old son the perfect leverage.

Basilton was taken straight out of school before Natasha had the chance to pick him up. Though he had been told he shouldn’t go along with people he didn’t know, he was a curious boy and thought he was far stronger than he actually was, so when a man showed up to his school telling him his mother had sent him to pick Basilton up, Basilton went with him. He was put in a room and told to be good, to sit tight and not make a sound and he wouldn’t get hurt. He was put on a speaker phone, where he had to ask his father if he would please pay the money so he could come home. After that, he was left alone in the small room with only a chair to sit on and a glum looking man to keep watch on him. It dawned on Basilton that he was in serious trouble and, for want of anything else to do, began to cry, begging for his mother. He was told to shut up but couldn’t.

The scientists thought their plan was fool-proof. Basilton was easy to control, even if he cried a lot, and they were certain it wouldn’t be long before Malcolm would pay up – he had spoken fondly of his son often enough, after all. While they were waiting for Malcolm to come to a decision (he had an hour to decide) one of the scientists came up with another idea: the funding they needed would be used mostly to pay for willing volunteers to test their method, and they had someone they could experiment on in Basilton. They could test their method just once before they applied it to a larger group of people.

They brought Basilton into a larger room, with an operating table in the very middle of it. There were cages near the back wall, from which there was a dangerous growling; Basilton could see two men and a woman, all three of them deadly pale and with flashing eyes and – most importantly – gleaming sharp teeth. Basilton had been read to enough to know what they were: vampires. Scared, he began to struggle, making for the door, but he was grabbed by both arms and put on the operating table. They strapped down his arms and legs so that he wouldn’t get away. Basilton screamed at the top of his lungs, but the scientists didn’t listen to him. One of them rolled up the sleeve of Basilton’s shirt while another went to the cages with a syringe.

There was an ominous growl before the scientist said something to the vampires in the cage and the growling stopped; Basilton couldn’t see what the scientist was doing, but moments later, he returned to the table. He tapped the syringe and then there was a sharp prick of pain on Basilton’s arm; he began to cry anew. The scientist who had strapped him down observed his reaction and told the other one, “Again.” The second scientist went back to the cage. Basilton tried to get away, struggling with all his might, but his limbs felt painful and sluggish and he struggled to keep his eyes open. Suddenly, the doors to the operating room opened with a bang and the scientists turned toward the woman at the door as one.

When the scientists took Basilton, they had failed to take one thing into account: Natasha’s fury once she found out her son had been kidnapped. While her husband was still deliberating the best course of action, she had snatched the car keys from the table and left the house in a huff, followed by Malcolm’s sister Fiona, who had always been sweet on Basilton. Now, she was standing in the doorway to the operating room, fire dancing around her hands and in her eyes.  Upon seeing her son strapped to the table, she let out an enraged roar and charged at the scientists. “Take Basil,” she snapped at Fiona before she set to work.

Basilton didn’t know what happened afterwards; the pain of whatever the scientists had injected him with made him pass out. When he woke up, he was in his bed at home, with a doctor checking his vitals. His father was sitting next to the bed in a chair, his eyes red, and Fiona was quiet as she leaned against the wall behind him. Basilton didn’t understand why until several hours later, when Fiona told him his mother was dead. The door to the vampires’ cage had been left open as Natasha had charged into the room before the scientist had closed it, and when the scientists had been killed and Fiona, Basilton, and Natasha were the only ones left in the room, they had set upon her, drinking to drink her blood. She had yelled at Fiona to get out of the room and get Basilton to safety; Fiona had done so, only looking back once, when fire erupted from the operating room. No one followed her. Only one body had been recovered among the ashes of the room – that of a woman who would later be identified as Natasha Grimm-Pitch.

Basilton was inconsolable for weeks, suffering from nightmares and crying out for his mother whenever he woke from them. He changed from a cheerful toddler into a serious, quiet boy who spoke very little with anyone other than Fiona. Eventually, life went on; Basil went back to school, and Malcolm eventually remarried. Basil retreated further into himself, though he tried not to worry his father too much, if only so he wouldn’t be fussed over. He just wanted to be left alone.

The effects of the vampire blood didn’t start showing until Baz was a teenager. One night when he was thirteen, he woke up one evening feeling parched, but when he went for a drink of water, it didn’t lessen his thirst. He drank more, but it didn’t help any; it merely made him feel full and nauseous. He felt jittery, panicked; black spots appeared at the edges of his vision. With trembling hands, he dialled Fiona’s number, as he always did whenever he was frightened. She picked up almost immediately despite the fact that it was four in the morning and listened to his agitated rambling.

“Go to the fridge in the garage,” she told him calmly once he had run out of steam. “There are bags of blood in it.” When he started to ask why there would be bags of blood in the fridge, she repeated, “Go to the fridge, Basil. Take the phone with you.” She waited for him to walk to the garage and open the fridge and then reminded him, gently but no less insistently, to take one of the bags of blood from the fridge. “Twist one of the caps off and drink it,” she said then, and Baz almost dropped the blood bag in shock. Almost as if she had read his mind, Fiona said, “Now, Basilton. You can ask questions later, if you still have them.” Baz contemplated, for a moment, not listening to her, hanging up on her and returning to bed and trying to ignore the thirst, but she had always looked out for him and she had never led him astray before. So he grudgingly twisted off one of the caps at the bottom of the blood bag and put it to his lips.

As much as the thought of drinking blood disgusted him – he had tasted his own blood before, after all – he tipped his head back and took a careful sip of the blood. It didn’t taste like he remembered; in fact, it tasted almost sweet. He found himself drinking more, greedily, until he had finished the entire bag. He only realised moments later that the thirst had vanished.

Baz wasn’t a stupid child; he knew what a thirst for blood made him. Grimly, he picked up the phone from where he had set it down so he could drink the blood and asked Fiona, “What did they inject me with when they took me?” Fiona explained – how they weren’t sure, but they thought they had injected him with blood taken freshly from the vampires in the room. That they had been watching him closely for years, stocking up on blood just in case he ever woke up like this. That Malcolm hadn’t wanted to consider the thought, but they had both known it would only be a matter of time.

By the end of it, Baz was reeling, and he sank down to the floor, with his back against the door of the fridge. He couldn’t believe that this was his life – that he was a vampire, or something like it, that he would have to drink blood on a regular basis or wake up with a similar – or even worse – thirst again. He must have been hyperventilating, because the next thing he became aware of was his aunt’s voice. “I’m coming to stay with you for a while,” she said, calmly enough that it slowed the rapid beating of Baz’ heart. “I’ll be there tomorrow. You’re going to get up and go back to bed and wait until I get there, all right? I’ll be there first thing in the morning. Tell your father when he wakes up.” Because he didn’t know what else he should do and Fiona seemed to know how to best go about this, Baz listened to her. He hung up the phone and went back to bed, though he couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, he sat up, the phone clutched in his hand, and watched the numbers on his alarm clock change over.

As she had promised, Fiona came over to stay with them the next day, and she helped Baz come to terms with his vampirism. He treated it like a disease and she went along with it because it calmed him. Initially, he balked every time he had to drink blood, but as time went on, it became another part of his life, like his dead mother and sickeningly sweet stepmother and father who he didn’t really speak to. Baz learned to take his symptoms in stride, though he did eventually switch to drinking animal blood; it simply didn’t feel right to drink blood obviously taken from hospitals and blood banks when normal people needed them more than Baz.

For years, Baz managed to hide his vampirism, but eventually, he was discovered feeding on a rat in one of the city’s parks by a patrolling police officer. Startled, Baz threw the man under a thrall so that he could get away, heart pounding. He stayed up all night, worrying if the man had seen enough to know what he was. When the police showed up at his door the next day, hands already on their weapons, he knew the jig was up. He darted up the stairs and threw as many of his possessions as he could into a duffel bag, after which he climbed out the window and ran as hard as he could, away from Salisbury. Fiona, who had been very open about his vampirism after it started showing himself, had told him where he should go if he ever needed to hide, so Baz got himself on a plane to Norway and hitchhiked his way to Inndyr, where he entered Miss Bluebonnet’s loop.


t r i v i a
» Baz has played the violin since he was six. He doesn’t like to admit he has any passions, but the violin is one.
» He hates being called Basilton; the only person who calls him that is his aunt when she’s angry with him. Basil is fine – though he prefers Baz – but he’ll wring your neck if you call him Basilton. That being said, he hates being called Tyrannus even more.
» Sunlight doesn’t harm Baz, but it annoys him regardless; it’s too bright on his eyes.
» He dislikes the idea of feeding on humans, so he makes do with animals – preferably rats, because they’re useless creatures in Baz’ eyes.
» Baz took his mother’s name when he entered the loop, in honour of her memory.
» He’s scared to death of rabbits because of a creepy picture in one of his children’s books.
» He doesn't like messes. And 'doesn't like' really means detests. He can get very snappy if someone forgets to clean up around him, though he won't quite lower himself to cleaning up the mess himself. He'll simply continue badgering someone until they finally cave and clean up.