So I've begun writing this new series (some of you familiar with my livejournal will have heard much of this already) about a kind of "Underworld" (like the movie) only set in Pittsburgh, and involving locations we not only know and love, but can actually visit.

The supernatural beings in the story are, besides the "traditional" two, vampires and werewolves, the wereravens and the zombies. The wereravens (called Corwen) are, as far as I am aware, my own invention, and I'm pretty partial to them as characters because unlike the werewolves and vampires, they have no baggage of how everyone expects them to be. Tynan, the "main character" of the film/story is also a relative newcomer to the world of the Immortals, but as a corwen, he is also a more sympathetic character than at least the vampires. Either way, I feel more comfortable with the animaloids, and in general I'm planning to portray the vampires as both out of their element (in America) and very pretentious, selfish, etc... but in a more human way perhaps than just the general mood of them that you see at least in Underworld. As individuals, then, I plan to portray them like sorority girls and law students (from a college standpoint) and/or still retaining the feels of the aristocracy of Europe, who are/were their progenitors.

For the werewolves, I want to make them very individualistic as humans, but, after all, real wolves are pack animals, so I want to include some clannishness. The werewolves in the story are not centrally quartered, like the corwen and the vampires, but live very "uninteresting" lives as construction workers, masons, furniture delverymen, etc. In general, too, they are less female (although there are a few female werewolves) and they are less technologically oriented with little awareness of how their lycanthropy functions, in contrast to the vampires who are tightly intertwined with medicine and technology, and the wereravens, who think it shiny, and who have particularly recently begun delving into bioengineering/life science since their primary foodsource (during their transformations) are the undead, and in the backdrop to the film, the Sycorax virus that causes the zombies has undergone troubling mutations that have both sickened the wereravens who were exposed to it (albeit not to zombify them) and the zombies themselves have become less controllable. But the werewolves, here again, are perhaps the easiest off in terms of satisfying their needing raw meat and having to kill for it. The pack leaders run a meat-processing plant (although I may, in the interest of decentralizing them, eliminate even this part of the backstory) to get access to animals without having to steal from the surrounding farms, or to kill people. It might be more interesting to have them not have this resource, however, which would make them even more alienated from the other two kindreds.

The main plot of the story so far is that before the film begins the wereravens are dealing with their zombie problems, but otherwise life as usual progresses. Tynan, somewhat of an outsider to the corwen unkindness (the group-noun for ravens), is working as most of the corwen do as a bike messenger around the city. This is going to be the opening shot of the film, him going around the city, and we see the other people in the city kind of as outsiders to his world, and maybe strategically plant some of the other Immortal characters in the crowds or backgrounds of the shots to foreshadow and to make it obvious how much the kindreds have blended into the city (more so than in other cities/countries.

A wereraven dies mysteriously in the Strip while working, and it doesn't seem like a normal killing. The corwen collect the body and cover up the murder, so as not to attract the central authorities' attention, and then they lash out, sending angry demands for explanations from the vampires, as well as questioning the werewolves, only to find out that the other two kindreds have seen deaths of their own, and with similar marks on the bodies.

As to what this is, I don't want to completely give away the plot, but in short, they have