Kevin's primarily a character I play in a Vampire: the Masquerade campaign called Borrowed Time with 5 of my internet friends. I forget when we started exactly but I think it was late 2017, I joined a couple sessions after everyone else.

What's the Plot?
The end of the world as we know it, bro. Borrowed Time started icly in NYC in November, 2009 and is a Gehenna chronicle. Gehenna is essentially the vampire apocalypse predicted by certain heretical vampire lore (it's part of Noddist beliefs, which also hold that the first vampire was the biblical Caine cursed by God.) When Gehenna comes, the oldest and most powerful vampires (which are currently in torpor) will rise up and devour all the younger ones and a lot of very bad things will happen. These old vampires are called antediluvians because they supposedly existed before the biblical flood. In terms of power, comparing an antediluvian to a normal vampire is basically like comparing a bull elephant to something made out of toothpicks.

In our campaign, NYC was at the very center of the opening act of the end of the world. Too bad all our characters lived there.

Prior to bullshit going down, New York is in the hands of the Camarilla, which is the sect of vampire clans that believe you should run cities in an orderly fashion for the good of everyone and maintain a polite vampire society with only a little murder sometimes, as a treat. This is as opposed to the Sabbat, who think being a vampire makes you awesome and the best way to unlive is to be an edgy bastard all the time. (As long as you don't piss off other Sabbat so much they kill you.) Both of them majorly suck. (There are also Anarchs who don't get along with either faction, but they are just as hypocritical and kind of never get anything important done ever.)

The pcs first met when they were all assigned to work together in a group called The Garbage Crew, which sounds insulting because it is. Everyone done fucked up in some way to earn the scorn of the rest of New York's vampires. The Garbage Crew's job is to do unsavory and demeaning work that other vampires don't want to, but that probably requires some actual vampires to do instead of ghouls (mortal minions who have been empowered by drinking vampire blood, which is also addictive).

Unfortunately for everyone, in the course of doing this work? They started uncovering signs of Gehenna, and nobody wanted to believe it. Then, the player characters got caught up in a situation where vampires were revealed to the world (woops) and while that was being sorted out, the first stages of the end of the world began.

As time has gone on, the game has progressed further and further into the vampire apocalypse and things have gotten weirder and weirder. Currently, New York has been destroyed and the gang is on a very terrible apocalypse road trip in a buddy's souped up vampire RV, trying to figure out what to do.

There are a lot of other subplots that have happened to make life complicated and strange, but these are the broad strokes.

Hey Zita, who did the art?
Thomas/Tommy/Tom, Leanne, the dog, Beckett, and Qadir were done by my friend Ossifer.
Beatrice was drawn by her player.
The others are borrowed from various sources, some canonical.

The Player Characters

"The Coterie" - "The Garbage Crew" - "The Fang Gang" - "The Vamp Squad" - "The Vang"

"Sometimes a family is a gaggle of messed up vampires and a bunch of barking dogs."

Thomas Ratliffe - Tommy - Tom

Tom's the oldest or second oldest player character, and is a Malkavian. Which is also to say: Tom is complicated. All Malkavians are a bit weird because they're connected to a confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes prophetic brain network spread across all members of the clan.

Tom used to be Thomas Ratliffe, a respectably dangerous participant in local vampire politics. He was notorious for taking fresh, abandoned vampires under his wing to help them develop into satisfactory members of vampire society, coming to find fault with them, and destroying them. Then, the Siege of New York happened when the Camarilla and Sabbat warred for control of NYC in 1999. Thomas killed a number of Sabbat by draining them of blood (which is very bad behavior even by vampire standards.) He lost his memory. He also got a weird thing going on where every night his face changed slightly, and he was hideously and monstrously ugly all the time.

When Kevin met him, he was Tommy: a raving apocalypse street preacher sort, but most of the city's Camarilla were convinced that the amnesia was Ratliffe playing some kind of long con. Tommy was very adamant that he was a new person, and oocly his past life was a surprise the GM cooked up for him to slowly excavate pieces of (made worse by the fact one of the vampires he killed was a woman from Clan Toreador that Leanne knew and Beatrice loved). He had visions, he was argumentative, and he often did things that made sense only to Tommy. Regardless, he also loved his friends very much and was trying very hard.

Very recently, Tommy was killed and came back... different. He got his old face back and his old memories, and lost his direct line to prophecy constantly drilling into his head. He's going by Tom these nights and is kind of dealing with a lot right now, figuring out who he is.

Kevin doesn't always understand him, but over time he keened into Tommy's vulnerabilities and how hard Tommy was trying (with only middling success) not to be a nuisance to others, and was able to support him. Tommy, in turn, was the first person to sincerely tell Kevin that he believed in him in a very, very long time. Tom's taken up the mantle and has been finally making some breakthroughs on Kevin's abysmal sense of self-worth.

Beatrice Brewer

Beatrice is from Clan Tremere. They do lots and lots of ritual blood magic and have a hierarchy structure where each member is blood bound: forced to drink the blood of more senior clan members to ensure blood-magic-enforced loyalty. This makes a lot of things about Beatrice's unlife very hard.

Beatrice is from roughly the 1840s or so, and is thus pretty uncomfortable with a lot of modern behaviors (especially with regards to how young people carry on these days, so unseemly). She is the smartest person in this coterie and we call her the Swiss Army Tremere because it turns out that thaumaturgy and blood magic rituals are useful in basically every situation. She likes science and history, and finds the rest of us except Leanne exhausting at all times. As a living woman, she was barred from success as a scientist and alienated from her family by good old Victorian sexism. A lot of this still hurts, but she doesn't want to admit it.

Beatrice is also notable for rolling some absolutely spectacular botches (critical dice failures) that have impacted the plot in huge ways and (at one point) caused us to skip probably a couple months' worth of planned content.

Of the vamp squad, Beatrice was probably the one who found Kevin the most offputting at outset because he represents so many things she can't stand. By now, though, she's grown fond of him and Kevin loves and respects Beatrice so, so very much, she is just the coolest?

Beatrice is having a repressed and very slow vampire nerd flirtation with Beckett.

Leanne Irving

Leanne is from Clan Toreador. Clan Toreador are art vampires. Each one has some form of expression that they are very good at, and members of the clan often select new Toreadors in an attempt to permanently preserve their artistic ability. Leanne's an odd one out because culinary arts are generally excluded. Still, she has a very high end restaurant that's only open at night because when you're as good as she is, you can do weird things like that and everyone puts it down to the eccentricity of genius and will pay extra for the exclusivity.

Leanne is the most level-headed of the coterie and has nerves of steel. This makes sense, considering she's someone who regularly works with a gas stove while vampires have a deep and primal terror of fire. We joke about how if Leanne's not around, we go to pieces as a group. (Last time, Beatrice and Tommy both went into anger frenzies at each other and Kevin was very upset.) She also has the distinction of once fending off a trained assassin vampire with a hotel room lamp. As time has gone on, she's somehow become the party's most distinguished physical fighter.

Leanne worries a lot about Kevin because she's come to like him, but also he's a boneheaded youth and makes a lot of bad choices re: his personal safety. This makes their friendship awkward sometimes, because being worried about makes him uncomfortable.

Leanne was embraced as a vampire during the 1920s.

Grace Fowler

A late addition to the party, Grace belongs to a player who had to quit the game early and came back later. Grace was a freshman at NYU who was recently estranged from her family when she came out as gay. She got embraced and abandoned (as is customary for the clan) by a Sabbat Gangrel about six months ago. Clan Gangrel are notable for strong connection to the beast at the heart of the vampiric nature; their clan flaw is that if they go into frenzy they come out of it with a permanent animalistic physical feature. (Grace's eyes reflect light in the dark like a cat's due to her first frenzy.)

Grace found Kevin online not long before the fall of New York as a result of the coterie ending up on the news. (It has been A Whole Thing.) Kevin took the chance on trusting her and has brought her into the group, which is even more alarming for the rest of the coterie because they thought Kevin was a baby already and now oh god, this one's even babier.

She's learning fast, and the whole group has taken up teaching Grace how to vampire in a way that is pretty heartwarming considering how awful early vampirism is for most.

Grace is probably Kevin's best friend, given that they can understand each other a lot more due to both being relatively very young vampires. He's a dumb skate punk and she's a book nerd, but sometimes they can just be a couple of honest, scared kids together, or go do something stupid but fun, and that's as good for their collective mental health as anything's been able to get lately.

Kevin Ingstrom

You know him, but he has a particular context within his group anyway. He's a bad example of Clan Brujah. Clan Brujah are known for being rabble-rousers and cause-havers with an anarchic bent and short vampiric tempers. Much of the clan falls easily into a leather-jacket-chain-wallet-doc-martens aesthetic, but skate punk is probably not unheard of. Kevin's lack of aggression or cause-having drive is very atypical.

Because Kevin is very young in vampire terms, the rest of the coterie started to develop confused adult responsibility emotions at him a lot because oh no, only a decade old, he's a baby. In the group, he's the moral center, empathy core, and emotional labor workhorse. Kevin may not know many things, but he has a lot of empathy and a strong conviction to minimize harm done to other people. He's patient and gentle in a way that a lot of them just can't be, and is able to give decency, understanding, and just listening in a way a lot of these guys have not had in a very long time. I didn't intend it when I made him, it just kind of happened that way and has been very cool to see play out. Kevin doesn't see what he's doing as special or even particularly useful, and others have been starting to point out to him how much it matters (to his great bewilderment.)

The Pack

During our investigation, the group adopted some very scary guard dogs that used to belong to a member of Clan Nosferatu (who, among other things, are gifted at working with animal ghouls.) The pack, whose lead dog is a particularly smart hound named Danny, are all very big and very spooky animals with uncanny, humanlike intelligence. As time has passed, the group has sincerely bonded with the hounds. They are much healthier and friendlier than they were when we found them, and a lot less unsettling to strangers. Having the dogs is good for everyone's emotional health, and everyone is in turn good for the dogs.

Prior to the Nosferatu hounds, the fang gang just had Scooby, who is Kevin's own dog ghoul he's had for years. Scooby is now the pack's collective precious baby brother.

Some of the Major NPCS:

"Honestly, I'm sorry for everyone that has to deal with us."

The Hungry Boi

Our ooc nickname for the terrifying horrorshow and actual sign of the apocalypse that ate New York. The coterie were put together to figure out what to do about this creepy carnivorous slime mold situation when it was developing in the sewer and... they figured out it's actually Clan Tzimisce's antediluvian. Clan Tzimisce are a Sabbat clan with horrifying body-altering powers, so an ancient slumbering vampire manifesting as a vampiric slime mold is frighteningly possible.

The coterie got sent to fight part of it when it came up out of the sewers, and even had the help of actual important vampires to do so, but success turned out to suck because they accidentally got caught on camera and now everyone in the world knows about vampires.

Oops.

The eating New York thing happened not long after.

Beckett

Cuthbert Beckett is a canonical VtM npc from Clan Gangrel, especially notable for his work in digging up vampire history and studying Noddist lore. He got involved with the crew early on in our investigation and, despite himself, has come to like us.

At one point, Beatrice and Leanne went on a road trip to upstate New York to rescue him from having been captured by Sascha Vykos, though it turned out that Beckett and his old enemy were both actually trapped by a chunk of Tzimisce antediluvian. Oops.

Beckett has been traveling a long time, and has a very cool sunlight-proof RV that the group escaped New York/has been traveling in since. He is also accompanied by his manservant/ghoul Cesare, who has no idea what to make of our nonsense at any given time.

Beckett and Beatrice have a vampire history nerd almost-flirtation thing that is going on to everyone's great ooc amusement.

Beckett finds Kevin sort of baffling, but that's the standard elder vampire reaction to Kevin when exposed to him for long periods. He just counts himself lucky he finally managed to get Kevin to understand that no, really, werewolves are a real thing that exists.

Vykos

Sascha Vykos is the signature canon npc for Clan Tzimisce, and the oldest vampire we know personally. (They were embraced 1,007 years ago.) They prefer to look more like a monster than a human being because they have a distinct body horror aesthetic. They have a hideous and deserved reputation for cruelty and violence, used to be a high ranking member of the Sabbat, and are currently living in the RV luggage compartment. Vykos's history of being written in canonical sources is very, ah, rough, and they wouldn't have really cropped up in the game if the GM hadn't liked one particular idea from the lore and decided to do something interesting and less edgy with them.

Vykos had another Tzimisce embedded into their body and completely controlling them for about the last 700 years, which recently left them in order to go join the antediluvian. (Which isn't to say they're secretly an angel or were totally innocent prior, just that they're very quietly having a crisis about being their own person and dealing with trauma now.) For reasons known only to Vykos, they chose to help us get out of New York when the antediluvian rose up to eat the city and became our most uncomfortable new ally. Beckett was not thrilled, but our list of allies is short right now so you do what you gotta do.

Of all people, Kevin is the one who has somehow been getting through to Vykos. The power difference between a vampire Vykos's age and Kevin is astronomical, so Kevin figures that if they sincerely wanted to hurt him there's not much he could do about it. So, he doesn't stress. He treats Vykos with the same basic decency he offers anybody, and listens to them when they decide to talk. Vykos has absolutely no idea what to do with this and, while they want him to stop, they also actually don't. They keep having conversations with Kevin where they intend to scare him off forever, instead end up revealing something personally vulnerable that gets treated with dignity and respect, and then fleeing at speed to reel from it only to do it again sometime later. Kevin has no idea what's going on, but supposes it is better than being killmurdered.

Essentially, to summarize this CR via a meme, it's this.

Lucita

Lucita de Aragon is the signature npc of Clan Lasombra. (As you may have guessed, a loooot of the canon npcs are in play.) Clan Lasombra is the leading clan of the Sabbat, and their whole thing is very lethal manipulation of shadows and t h e v o i d.

Lucita is an old friend of Beckett's who has been through a great deal of bullshit with him in the past, and one of the few people on this earth qualified for Vykos wrangling duty. She joined up with the gang after finally, finally getting to kill her shitty vampire sire during the fall of New York, and almost getting eaten by the antediluvian.

Lucita sees herself as a necessary ruthlessly practical element in the group, because we are monsters who must master our feelings and not have room for sentiment. In short, she's Coping™.

Lucita hasn't had a lot of personal interaction with Kevin one to one, but sees him as a destabilizing force that is at odds with her goals there. He keeps talking to Beckett about feelings and has somehow made Vykos, of all people, get weird. The kid's a problem in the group, if you ask her.

Kevin kinda knows Lucita doesn't like him, but it doesn't bother him a whole lot. Her not liking him mostly isn't personal, it's fine, he's extremely used to that.

Qadir

Another canon character, though much less prominent because he's from like two paragraphs and a blurry image in a setting book from the early 90s. (He recently got an important role in a visual novel, but our campaign had him first and doesn't care.) Qadir al-Asmai is a Toreador and was, very briefly, the Prince of New York. A Camarilla Prince is the one in charge of keeping the city running smoothly so that vampires aren't murdering one another over dumb bullshit all the time. The previous Prince got outed for running a coverup for the apocalyptic evidence the gang found, and leadership got handed to Qadir (who had been the Sheriff, and had sent us into the tunnels to find that evidence in the first place.)

Then the whole thing with our coterie ending up on national TV by accident meant the whole Camarilla from all of everywhere swanned into his city to do PR, and he was in deep shit for his city being the place where the Masquerade broke. GJ, Qadir. This inspired him to send a trained vampire assassin after us in a fit of pique, but Leanne fended said assassin (and his shitty rolls) off with a lamp. GJ, Qadir.

It turns out that part of why he was so mad at us was lingering hurt because he and Thomas Ratliffe had been lovers, but then after the Siege there was just... Tommy. So that's actually pretty sad. Tommy didn't figure this out for a while, but the party (especially Tommy) still ended up convincing Qadir to leave his sinking ship of a city to go on this horrible apocalypse roadtrip (thus saving his life.)

Tom, having regained his memories, is now dealing with the knowledge that when Thomas and Qadir were together, Thomas was actually a manipulative and abusive person who hurt him a great deal.

Qadir, for his part, is dealing with the pain of having lost his city (which he genuinely was extremely dedicated to) and, well. Everything else. He's been embroidering again (his art) to cope, and has made Tom's hoodie very fancy. (It has a phoenix on it now. Thematic.)

Kevin admires Qadir's dedication and can hear the sincerity when he talks about his duty, but Kevin cannot live up to Qadir's vampire etiquette standards. Like at all. Talking to Qadir is hard because even when he doesn't mean to (and he usually did), he makes Kevin feel like the most deeply inadequate person in a way that stresses him out. Kevin is trying to work past that and intends to try reaching out again when his own back yard is maybe more in order.

Kevin's World and Kevin's Friends