Marzanna Zalewski

## **Family and history:**

**Daughter to a baker and his wife. The second youngest of 5. 2 boys, 3 girls. Had a very good relationship with her family. None of the rest of them became vampires.**

**Married a decently wealthy philosophy scholar, Leon, at 20. He was nice enough but it was no great love affair. They moved to Kraków shortly after marrying so Leon could apprentice at the university there. He soon became a professor. They tried to have kids but Marzanna had trouble conceiving. Because of this she has a soft spot for kids.**

**In 1805, Leon and Marzanna were walking home at night when they were attacked by a vampire. Leon was killed. Marzanna almost died. The vampire bled her almost to death but she begged for her life and he, feeling some sympathy, turned her at the last minute.  He didn’t explain it to her. He just turned her and left her to fend for herself. A carriage came across Marzanna mourning Leon on the street. The carriage stopped and the people took Marzanna in to help her. The next day, Marzanna couldn’t control herself, ate the entire family, stole a LOT of money, and fled the city.**

**She went north, planning to go back to her family. Where else would she go? But when she got to the house, she stood outside, looking in at her family, and realized if she went inside it would only endanger them. So she left. She headed west to Poznan, where she started a new, albeit extremely modest, life. As time went by and she didn’t age, she had to move around Poland continuously. The longest she stayed in one place in Poland was the 7 years she spent in Poznan.**

**In 1852, she was at a market in Łódź. Turns out her now elderly little sister, Irene, had married and moved there long ago. Irene knew the woman in the market was too young to be her sister, but she had to stop the woman to marvel at the resemblance. Marzanna played dumb, like she didn’t know her. Like she didn’t have to fight every fiber of her being to stop herself from jumping into her sisters arms. She learned that her family had heard about Leon’s death and her going missing. They’d lost hope of finding her years ago.**

**After that encounter, she decided to move so far away she would never have to worry about having a painful experience like that again. She took a train West to the ocean and hopped on the first ship she could find to America. She went to Buffalo, NY, as many Poles did then, and settled on the east side. She stayed there 10 years before deciding she had to move along.**

**She spent about 100 years traveling the world, constantly moving. 2 weeks here, a month there.  She did spend a significant amount of time living in the newly opened Paris opera house after hearing about the caverns beneath it. She spent about 20 years there coming and going. She really did not enjoy a performance one night and crashed the chandelier counterweight to make it stop. This earned her the title of the “phantom of the opera.”  She was ok with this until Leroux came along and started saying she was some hideously deformed man.**

**In the 1960s she went back to Buffalo. The Shea’s theatre was abandoned so she decided to pull a phantom of the opera and make her home there. After 5 more years there, someone there discovered her secret so she fled to nyc in 1969. There she found the myriad, where she has been ever since. They are her family now. She really liked the phantom of the opera aesthetic she had going at sheas in buffalo so she found a nice old broadway theatre to haunt: the Lyceum. She considered that she’d blend in better at the New Amsterdam theatre but honestly, being immortal has not taken away her fear of ghosts.**

## **Marzanna Zalewski’s foolproof money scheme:**

* **Go to a city a decent distance away from current home**
* **Get someone wealthy to take you to their house, whether through seduction or pity or whatever worked for the situation. Someone she deemed deserving of death (scummy men, the bourgeoisie)**
* **Eat them and any witnesses**
* **Take their money/valuables and run**

**This plan became more difficult as technology advanced. Surveillance cameras made it impossible.**

## **Fun facts:**

* **Biggest fear: Being burned/drowned. (Thanks Mom and Dad, for naming her Marzanna)(There’s a Polish festival in the spring where they beat and burn or drown an effigy of the goddess Marzanna. This freaked out young human Marzanna quite a bit.)**
* **Favorite smell: fresh baked bread. It reminds her of her childhood.**
* **Schooling history: She never went to school. As a human, her mother taught her “women’s work.” As a vampire she has read many books and taught herself everything she knows. She’s both book smart and street smart.**
* **Becoming a vampire is both the best and worst thing that ever happened to her. Depends on her mood that day.**
* **Opinion on the meaning of life: there is none. You’re born, you try to survive, you die, or not. Everything else is chaos.**
* **Fatal flaw: can’t let go. Of memories, grudges, anything.**
* **Fight or flight? Flight for society, fight for personal (aka she fled cities when she was in danger of being discovered but will rip your head off if you personally cross her)**
* **Religious views: raised catholic. Wants to believe in something but not sure she really can.**
* **Her idea of heaven: being with her family again.**
* **Her idea of hell: being completely alone, forever.**
* **Minimalist with belongings.**
* **Has become quite a skilled artist over the years. She usually draws people she has lost, mostly her family, sometimes Leon.**
* **She actually hates her fangs, both the look and feel of them, so she keeps them glamoured unless she’s using them.**