Carlisle Cullen

*The Vampire Physician*

* Overview
* Sheet
* Background
* Logs

 Dr. Cullen is a brilliant doctor who could probably work in any hospital in the world, make ten times the salary he gets here. We're lucky to have him. He's an asset to the community...

— Charlie to Bella on Carlisle

Carlisle is usually to be found at Forks Hospital, or among the Cullen family. If you are having a scene at the hospital and need a doctor present feel free to ask!

## Personality

Carlisle is a gentle soul, trapped in the body of what he believes to be a monster. Despite the good that he has done in his immortal life, Carlisle believes himself a soulless creature doomed to hell if and when he no longer walks the earth. He is, however, damned and determined to do as much good and as little harm as he can until that day. He is a devoted family man and will be moved to physical violence more readily to protect them than himself in virtually any and every case. He respects the laws that keep vampires safe, though not always the lifestyle most vampires adopt. Having gone for centuries now as a "vegetarian," he believes that it is entirely possible for all vampires to live similarly, if they were simply willing to try. He is a man of old world values and modern knowledge. He has seen much suffering in his long life, and sometimes it shows in his eyes or in a somewhat sad smile. But overall, he is a positive individual, and always a gentleman.

## SIGNATURE ABILITY

### My True Self

Carlisle Cullen has spent centuries refining his willpower into something beyond assailing. Even as a human being he was strong willed, but after so many years of unlife, his willpower has grown into something approaching a power of a sort.

In situations where his willpower might otherwise crumble or fail, even against magic and reality altering events, Carlisle is able to maintain his grasp on himself and on who he wishes to be. His faith in the person he wishes to be is strong enough to always ensure he remains so.

## SKILLS

Carlisle is a healer, not a fighter. However, he has not survived for nearly 400 years without having some scraps. He is roughly as able as any marine after basic training...if said marine was also a vampire with vampiric physical acumen. He has served in military conflicts before, including the American Civil War. He knows the basics of hand to hand combat, as well as how to use some firearms. However, he truly tries to avoid any form of conflict unless circumstances leave him with no other options.

Carlisle has spent many long years becoming a paragon of competence in the field of medicine. However, that dedication has hardly been a singular drive in his life. He has pursued the arts and is a classically trained pianist, and he can play a violin almost as well. He has experienced a great deal of history firsthand and can speak with exceptional knowledge on the topic. While by no means a Wall Street financier, he has seen enough over his long life to make shrewd enough investments to keep himself and his family well off for centuries. He has a wealth of general knowledge he has accumulated, both mundane and arcane, and as a vampire he of course forgets nothing. One of the most practical skills he has learned is how to appear human. It is one he practices every day in his job at Forks Hospital.

Carlisle Cullen is one of the most skilled medical doctors on the planet, with centuries to refine his practice and a constant voracious desire to learn cutting-edge medical procedures. He is a perfect fusion of tried and true methods and 21st century knowhow. Equally comfortable treating a regular common cold or performing complex surgical procedures, his centuries of study make him the equal of any scholar of medical science working in the field today. But his medical skills are hardly limited to only human beings. Carlisle has studied the physiology of vampires extensively, as well as other supernatural creatures as the opportunities have presented themselves. While not the expert that he is with human and vampire physiology, he is well versed in the medical needs other denizens of the night, just the same.

## POWERS

Vampires exude an aura of appeal. Their features, their voices, and even their scent (which contain pheromones that appeal to humans) are designed to make these predators more appealing to humans. This allows them to easily draw in those of weaker will, whether to make them prey or simply hold their attention more effectively in a social situation.

Vampires are able to manifest fangs that rate as Enhanced-level weapons. These fangs are one method by which vampires can transmit their venom, which counts as an Enhanced-level toxin. Light doses of this venom cause limited paralysis and fog the memory, so a vampire with great control can feed on humans without causing them lasting harm. Humans thusly affected remain mentally foggy and easily suggestible for up to a few hours afterward. In larger doses, the venom becomes lethal and can be used to transform humans into vampires.

Vampires possess physical strength sufficient to bend and twist metal bars, smash through most non-armored structures, and break through a brick wall with sustained moderate effort. Usually able to push up to a few tons and dead lift a small motor vehicle. They also have enhanced toughness and are much harder to kill. With skin as hard as stone, their toughness is sufficient to shrug off what would be lethal wounds for ordinary humans. If damaged, they break like stone, but they can recover if most of the pieces are reassembled. They are vulnerable to fire, however.

Vampires possess agility several times that of peak human potential, allowing them to catch arrows with moderate effort or dodge bullets with a bit of luck. This also allows for visibly enhanced running speed and reflexes, from ten to twenty times human norms. They are also able to run in bursts so fast that the eye can scarcely follow. While they do not take all actions at this speed, they are easily able to run at faster than two hundred miles per hour, in many cases approaching three hundred miles per hour or more.

Vampires have strong regenerative powers, sufficient to recover from even lethal wounds without great loss of ability. Minor wounds heal almost instantly, and even severe wounds heal within a few hours to a few days, usually "off screen." Extensive healing may take longer, such as if they need to reattach a limb. Additionally, by drawing on the power of blood, vampires can emulate some of the processes of human life. For example, a vampire could process food (though they derive no nutrition from it) or make their hair grow. This does cost them extra blood expenditure, so it tends to be something of a luxury.

Vampires have vastly enhanced senses, capable of detecting levels of minutia that are well beyond human sensory input. Indeed, the spectrum of sensory information available to vampires actually makes it difficult for them to remember details from when they were human. However, experiences from the time they become a vampire are always recalled with precise clarity, no matter how old they may be. They can see in the dark, track scents by blood alone, hear a heartbeat from over a mile away if conditions are quiet enough, and listen in on conversations from a great distance. They can see with the accuracy of a bird or prey, spotting small targets from over a mile away.

## ADVANTAGES

Vampires are uncommonly beautiful, not only due to their porcelain perfect skin and their exuded aura of appeal, but the transformation literally refines their features, turning a plain human into a lovely vampire and an attractive human into a stunning immortal beauty.

Carlisle has been alive a very long time now. He has travelled the world over and met many people, both of the immortal and mortal variety. He is well respected as a voice of reason, well trusted as a gentleman. In times of need there are many that, if he called on them, would come: covens, both "vegetarian" and otherwise, that know he is to be trusted and listened to. Of course this also cuts both ways, and in times of need they might well call upon him as well.

Carlisle is a gentleman. Soft-spoken, he is the very epitome of graciousness and manners, to such a point that it can be very disarming. Even those with a mind more inclined to hostility will often find the thought of doing harm in his presence, or much less to him, somehow anathema. Carlisle just seems very inoffensive that way, and hardly a target for malice or scorn.

Carlisle has devoted centuries of his life as a vampire to mastering control over his urges. He is utterly immune to bloodlust, even when he has gone for extended periods without feeding. It is his flawless self control that allows him to perform as a surgeon and medical doctor without fear of harming anyone. Constant exposure to human blood has tempered his control, refining it, such that it offers no temptation at all any longer. Carlisle can go months at a time without the urge to feed, though he seldom taxes himself without good cause, given his "vegetarian" lifestyle.

Carlisle has amassed a sizable fortune over his many years of unlife, one which has grown substantially larger thanks to the precognitive abilities of his "daughter" Alice. The Cullen family wants for nothing, really. They have whatever they desire, that money can buy. The fastest cars, homes in remote areas across the planet, private islands. Little is beyond the wealth they have accumulated.

## WEAKNESSES

Vampires will be incapacitated if they are decapitated, despite their various powers. However, if their body parts remain essentially intact, they can often be reassembled and reanimated by being fed blood.

Vampiric venom is highly flammable. Thus, if a vampire is damaged enough to "bleed" their venom, that venom can be set aflame. This tends to cause extreme damage to the vampire and is likely to be fatal.

Vampires exude strong pheromones that are highly appealing to humans. However, many other supernatural creatures with enhanced senses, particularly most varieties of werewolf, find this scent vile and offensive--as well as easily to detect and track. As such, while the pheromones of a vampire make them much more effective as human-hunters, it can also make them prey if they are not careful.

Carlisle is a healer by nature. He prefers to avoid conflict whenever necessary, sometimes even when it stretches reason. While he is not precisely a pacifist, he is passive at times. In essence, where conflict is concerned, he is a procrastinator, never in a hurry to resolve matters through violence, even if it is clear it shall eventually come to that. Superficially, this may come across as naivete, particularly when coupled with an inherent belief in the goodness of people. But the truth is that while he is a rather good judge of character, he truly believes anyone can change if they truly wish to. He could hardly be a "vegetarian" vampire without the belief that one can rise above one's nature and chart their own path.

Sunlight causes vampires to shimmer brightly due to the crystalline structure of their skin, which tends to draw a great deal of attention.

## Section 1

Carlisle Cullen was born sometime during the 1640s in London. The precise date he has never been certain of, as time and record keeping was far less accurately kept track of then, for the common rabble at least. The son of an Anglican pastor, his mother passed on from complications with his delivery. Carlisle was thus raised by his father, who like other pastors of his time was consumed with ridding the world of evil and sin.

To that end his father, along with others of the cloth, would lead hunts for the dark things they were convinced haunted the nights: vampires, witches, werewolves, and demons of all varieties -- all of the ghouls and creatures that would prey on the virtue and goodness of their flocks. Typically in their overzealous haste, these mobs only managed to harm or murder the innocent they professed to wish to defend, their true targets eluding their clumsy attempts with the consummate ease born of being creatures of the night.

## Section 2

As his father aged, Carlisle took over the raids against the damned creatures that hunted the night. He lacked the killer instinct his father displayed. He was patient and not quick to see monsters where none existed. Instead he pursued the supernatural that he fervently knew to exist, in a more methodical manner. It was that tenacity that actually allowed him to find a true vampire coven living in the sewers of London, a coven that he himself lead the crusade against.

In the pursuit, he pulled ahead of the rest of the mob he was leading. One of the vampires faced him, and, in an instant, Carlisle was writhing in agony on the ground. He had been bit by the creature, and its venom was already spreading through him. Knowing that his father would kill him on sight, and not wishing to inflict that agony on him, Carlisle crawled into a potato cellar and hid there for three days. Throughout the transformation as his body and organs slowly calcified, in unspeakable agony, he never uttered a sound. He emerged on the third night as that which he had spent his life hunting: a soulless creature of the night. One of the eternally damned. A vampire.

## Section 3

Carlisle was horrified with his transformation and sought a way to end his undead life. He tried throwing himself from great heights, drowning himself, and finally in desperation the slow death of starvation. Hiding in a cave, he became so starved for the blood he needed to survive that he attacked a passing deer. Finding his thoughts clearing after that, he realized that he did not need to feed from and harm human beings. As a mortal he had fed on animals, was this really so terribly different? With the recognition that he could survive as a vampire, without the need to murder human beings, Carlisle Cullen rejoined the world at large, learning more about what he was and what it meant to be a vampire through the vampire Alistair, who would remain his lifelong, if reclusive and paranoid, friend.

Over the course of his first two centuries of life, Carlisle became a nighttime patron of the arts. The very meticulous nature that had resulted in him finding, and indeed becoming a vampire, now served another purpose: through constant study, Carlisle became a peerless doctor, a man of science and medicine. His great willpower slowly allowed him to develop a nigh-unheard of flawless resistance to the lure of human blood. It offered him no temptation at all by the time the next major chapter of his life began.

## Section 4

While studying in Italy, Carlisle discovered that vampires had a type of royalty in the form of the Volturi. This coven dominated the world of their kind, having overthrown the merciless Romanian Coven centuries before. They were led by the enigmatic vampires Marcus, Caius, and Aro, all so very much more refined than those Carlisle had known previously, educated and patrons of art and culture. However, they still subsisted on human blood, thinking of human beings as little more than animals. Carlisle remained with them for two decades, in that time learning much of the world through their great intellects and age. The three master vampires always attempted to convert Carlisle to what they considered his natural food source, with him attempting to steer them down a less blood-soaked path. Never the two would meet.

Eventually Carlisle's desire to do good in the world built to a point that he left Italy and the Volturi coven, having never truly belonged nor ever joined them. He moved to the New World and began practicing medicine as a doctor, using his skills to help people. Carlisle found a balm for the soul he was convinced he no longer truly even had. But despite having found what he felt he was meant to do in his near-measureless time on Earth. He was very lonely and longed for the company of someone like himself.

## Section 5

In the year 1911, Carlisle was working as a doctor in Columbus while the local doctor was away. That was how he came to treat Esme Anne Platt for a broken leg after falling out of a tree. Though she was only a young teenager at the time, there was a strong mutual attraction between them, as she was in fact a singer for him...a term used when a mortal's blood called out to an immortal like a siren song. But for Carlisle the song held no sway, as he had no desire for human blood. The attraction nonetheless was still there. The eternally youthful looking vampire would move on shortly after, still searching for some type of companionship that seemed to forever elude him. The desire that was growing so great that he started to consider an idea he had once regarded as abhorrent: creating companions of his own.

In 1918, Carlisle reached a fateful turning point in his life. While working nights in a Chicago hospital during the Spanish influenza crisis, he met a woman named Elizabeth Masen. She was dying of the illness, along with her seventeen year old son Edward. On her deathbed she bade Carlisle, with a fiery intensity, to do anything he had to do to save her Edward. He was special and had to be saved. The passion, and the knowing look in her eyes, suggested to Carlisle that she knew he had the means to save him, if he dared to use it. Knowing it was her dying wish, and that Edward would be alone in life now, he took the chance soon after Elizabeth passed. Edward Masen died that night, but Edward Cullen was born. They began to travel together under the cover story that Edward was the younger brother of Carlisle's late wife.

## Section 6

Edward was indeed special as his mother had believed, his natural insight as a human granting him a powerful mind reading talent as a vampire. The pair traveled across the country, never staying in any one place for that long. In 1921, they moved to Ashland, Wisconsin. There Carlisle again worked as a doctor, and it was in that capacity that he was called to the bedside of a dying young woman with injuries she had sustained from a failed suicide attempt after the loss of her child. Carlisle was beyond saddened to find that the woman was the very same woman he had treated years before, Esme Anne Platt. He was moved to a terrible sorrow to see the once vivacious and so full of life woman brought so low.

He turned her into a vampire in order to save her life, explaining to her after her rebirth three days later what he had done to her. Esme surprised him and accepted her new life gracefully. She was not in the least upset with his decision to save her in such a manner. She had long considered Carlisle the model by which she measured a gentleman, her very ideal gentlemen, having never forgotten him. In short order they fell in love and married, creating the beginning of the Cullen family, as opposed to coven.

## Section 7

Some years later, Carlisle came across a young woman in the streets. She had been beaten and brutally raped by her fiancée and several friends of his. Her features were still so beautiful beneath the physical damage inflicted on her, as her lifeblood pooled around her. Carlisle was again moved and turned Rosalie Hale into a vampire. She did not adapt as well to being a vampire, lamenting the things she would now never have or ever know: a family of her own, complete with a child. Two years later she would find companionship, coming across a young man named Emmett McCarty, who had been brutally mauled by a bear. His blood sang to her, but she held her breath and ran him over a hundred miles to Carlisle, so that he might change him. Emmett and Rosalie quickly fell in love as well, Carlisle's family growing ever larger.

Around 1950, Mary Alice Brandon arrived at Carlisle's front door with Jasper Whitlock in tow. Both were already vampires, both with extraordinary talents. Alice's in particular was one of precognition, the gift of prophecy. She knew both she and Jasper belonged with Carlisle and his burgeoning family. She even knew what room in the house they owned was going to be hers, a house that was in a small town in Washington state named Forks.

Carlisle had lived in Forks some years before, shortly after Emmett had been turned, but before Alice and Jasper joined them. They had secured a treaty with a tribe of Native American werewolves that knew what they were. In exchange for staying off Quileute lands and not turning any humans into vampires, the pack would let them live in peace and keep their secret. Moving back to Forks once again, Carlisle and Esme posed as a married couple that had adopted a number of children. Jasper and Rosalie posed as twins, with Jasper taking the name Hale. Alice adopted the name Cullen as Edward had decades before. With a job at Forks Hospital easily secured, the Cullen family settled in Forks for a quiet life. But Forks would have more than its share of surprises still in store...enough to show even a near 400-year-old vampire that he had hardly seen everything.

Logs featuring Carlisle Cullen:

* 2019.02.27 - The End of the Apocalypse