*Deceased

Name: Isaac Remy Christoffersen
*Mother: Alaina Rebecca Johansen (went by Lain)
Father: David Remy Christoffersen (goes by Remy)
Oldest Brother: John Michael Christoffersen (named by Lain; goes by John)
Second Oldest Brother: Remy Joseph Christoffersen (named by Remy; goes by Joe)
*Older Brother: Jacob Jesse Christoffersen (named by Lain; Jake by Isaac, Jesse to others)
Gender: Male
Age: 58
Apparent Age: 30s
Place of Birth: Waterproof, LA
Species: Vampire
Coven: Nephim

Appearance: If ever you were to go down to the small Louisiana town of Waterproof, you might not know to look for a man locals call Shotgun. He be a man as southern as Stonewall Jackson, his drawl marking him for a Cajun as much as his five o’clock shadow marks him for a man unobsessed with how the public views him. His half-lazy, half-bored strolling gait carries his lean form as his dark-blue eyes stare out at the world around him from between dark-brown, almost black bangs reminiscent of upside-down horns; locks of the same hang thick to the nape of his skinny neck. The blue jeans that seem to constantly adorn his strong legs, tanned dark like the rest of him, are often accompanied by a t-shirt or tank top and his size-ten feet are typically covered with a pair of hand-made snakeskin boots fashioned by his oldest brother. A long overcoat the color of an old barn with faded red paint tends to keep the rain off his back while a matching flat-top hat with a wide brim and a snakeskin hat band shadow his knife-scarred face. His calloused hands can handle a pool cue like a pro, whether at a table or against a gang of thugs hoping for some free greenbacks; if he’s wearing his coat and hat, he’s rarely found without a custom two-piece cue stashed in a hidden pocket. Almost as rare is the lack of a ten-gauge, single-barrel, sawed-off shotgun and plenty of shells found in other hidden pockets – a fact for which Isaac is oft-named among his kin and the good folks of Waterproof, Louisiana. His nose has been broken several times, but it still somehow manages to look halfway decent most of the time. His most prized possession is a choker he got from a woman when he was just seventeen (see History); it’s a brown leather corn with Indian beads made of bone, antler, and wood strung on it.

Languages Spoken: English, Limited French

Languages Read/Written: English

History: It was the nineteenth century when Waterproof was founded. A bunch of settlers headed for Texas decided to stop in Louisiana from exhaustion; they made their homes there. Since that time, many folks from all around have come to settle in the area. The town itself is pretty small, though, only having four hundred people around the time Isaac’s story starts. Many of the surrounding farms grew cotton; it’s hard life, but it’s honest work. While not as fancy as bigger cities like New Orleans, it’s just as colorful in its own way. Off to the east is the Mississippi River, but it’s to the north and west of Waterproof that the Cajun of which I speak made his debut. There lies a swamp the likes of which has been inhabited by Cajuns and Creole for so long no one really remembers when they showed up anymore. All anyone knows is not to go near the swamp if it’s a full moon or the man called Shotgun’s been drinking.

Isaac came up from a long line of Cajuns and Creole mixed in. His mother was a seamstress and his father was a hunter. His two oldest brothers took after their father, while the second-youngest was as big and mean as he was dumb. Isaac looked out for his brother for most of his childhood, though it was Jacob that was always bailing him out of fights. Their father taught all the boys to shoot guns and cues, to cheat at poker, to throw a knife fit to kill a circus man, and to drink like there was no tomorrow. It was into this life Isaac was born, the youngest of four boys and the damndest shot this side of the Mississippi.

The turning point in Isaac’s life came when Jake got a little too rough with a couple of morons troubling a young lady in a liquor store on the outskirts of Natchez, just the other side of the Mississippi. The dude behind the counter thought he was trying to rob the place and pulled a gun. It was Isaac that saved his life, but he ended up having to fight his way to the truck just to get out of town. He lost the cops crossing the Mississippi and soon disappeared into the swamp. Rumor had it he killed the dude by shooting him eight times in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun; that’s how he got the name.

Isaac always seemed to be the center of attention growing up. He got his first tattoo, a great-horned owl’s head covering most of his back, when he was just sixteen; it took four trips to get the whole thing on there and looking good. His second was an eagle sitting on a branch with wings spread out; it went on his left shoulder. He got that one when he was seventeen, just a few months after he took a knife to the face in a brawl at the south end of Waterproof one warm July evening. A month after that, he started dating a woman called Liz Calhoun. She left after she got beat up by her ex-boyfriend for going out with him, to which he responded by kicking the shit out of the city boy responsible. He still wears the Indian bead choker she gave him for his eighteenth birthday, though.

Shotgun got his nickname when he was twenty-one. When he was twenty-three, his brother got thrown in jail for beating up a couple of cops and Shotgun had to bail him out; he ended up going to prison anyway, where he got knifed a year later. By the time anyone heard about it, he’d already been buried in the prison graveyard. So it was that Shotgun found himself busting up a sheriff Alabama not letting him take his brother’s body home. He had to run off before more than he could handle showed up, but he broke into the prison late that night and killed three guards. He broke out, too, with his brother’s body in tow. When he got back home to the swamp, the family buried Jack properly. Shotgun took his death harder than anyone. He left just a week after they’d buried him and didn’t come back.

Shotgun spent quite a bit of time in New Orleans before his parents found him. He got into a huge fight with his father and ended up busting a beer bottle over his head; leaving his father bleeding and unconscious on the ground wasn’t something he could do, though, so he sat him up at a table and left him in the care of the bartender. He left New Orleans the same night and didn’t come back there, either. He mostly traveled up north after that, picking up greenbacks from poker and pool while drinking himself into a stupor some nights; other nights, he’d end up with some woman whose name he never bothered to ask only to kick her out so when he was done with her so he could get some sleep. He never did sleep much, though, haunted as he was by the nightmares of how his brother might have died and the thoughts of what he could have done to prevent it. He’d always looked out for Jake; they were blood, after all. But he was gone and he wasn’t coming back – just like Shotgun wasn’t coming back.

One night, he did phone his mother to let her know he was all right. They talked for a while, mostly about Jake, but then she made the mistake of trying to get him to come home. He said he wasn’t ready to do that yet, but he did wire some money to her. Then he hung up and took off again. It was three nights later, though that things took a turn for the worst.

He should have been dead. He should have been nothing but a corpse. A gang of vampires up in Norfolk, Nebraska figured on getting a meal out of Shotgun. What they didn’t count on was that he wasn’t going to end up dead – not completely, anyway. One of the vampires was told to stay behind and clean up the mess; one of the older ones was laughing as the three of them walked away. But instead of cleaning it up, the one called James Elias Benton turned Isaac. He woke up in a run-down shack somewhere near a weigh station just south of the Canadian border in North Dakota. He was told everything he needed to know about what he was, everything his young sire – a boy of no more than fifty years – knew about his own immortality. He was given a choice: take the old Indian sitting out in front and go wherever he pleased, or chain it up in the back of the pickup and ride with his sire down to the Dead of Night Motel in Dodge City, Kansas; his own truck had apparently been sold (along with the guns and what-not inside it). He took the keys and parted ways with Elias.

The first place he ended up in was Westhope, a town just a few miles from the national border crossing. He did some drinking there to think about what had happened to him, but apparently someone wanted his seat so he could see the TV better; it was mid-December and the Broncos were playing. He liked the Broncos. But Shotgun was in no mood to be hassled for his seat. To put it simply, he was in really bad fucking mood and told the man to piss off. The man didn’t like that and tried to push him out of his seat – thereby starting a bar brawl. Shotgun ended up tearing the place to shreds and was the only one standing after the chaos. Aside from him, the bartender was also the only one conscious. He tossed some money down and walked out. His words to himself as he felt the cool night air upon his undead skin were, “I could get used to this.”

He spent a number of years passing through one small town after another in Canada, feeding every night and taking what he could from people who knew as much about cards as he did about computers. He’d call his mother every once in a while, but he never visited. Somehow, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. One night, though, he drove all the way back to be with his mother; it took him six hours to get out of Canada and three days to get home, limited as he was by the sun. His mother was dying. He spent all the time he could with her, but her aged body finally gave out just twelve hours after he showed up.

His father blamed Shotgun for Lain’s death and they got into a huge fight again. This time, Shotgun scared the shit out of himself and his brothers by beating the old man nearly to death. After the funeral, he took off and didn’t look back. He wound up in Canada again pretty quick, but it was a few months before he rode up near Demaitre. The story of his old life ended after his mother’s funeral. This is where the story of his new life begins.