MERSENNE

Real name: Mersenne
Occupation: Scavenger, Priest of Mordiggian
Identity: Mersenne's identity and existence is unknown to the vast majority of the world.
Legal status: Mersenne has no legal status.
Other aliases: None known
Place of birth: Somewhere in France
Marital status: Single
Known relatives: None known
Group affiliation: Keepers of the Faith
Base of operations: Tunnels far below NYC
First appearance: May, 2002
History:

Mersenne was born in France in the 17th century. He subsequently became a ghoul, and in 1704 was brought into the New York area, along with other ghouls, by a human cult leader who needed their help. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement because the New World provided the ghouls with a mostly untapped source of dead bodies to feast on.

The cult eventually mostly died out, but the ghouls endured and eventually absorbed some of the survivors, and lived out their lives under New York unbeknownst to the surface world.

At some point, Manhattan Island had no more room to bury new bodies. As ghouls feast on the dead, this led to a crisis in the food supply. Eventually the ghoul population split, some immigrating to other areas they hoped would be more lucrative, but many staying, believing that the coming of the Old Ones would be soon and then New York City would be full of the dead. Mersenne was one of the latter group. His kind survived in part through deals with some occultists, providing services in exchange for bodies. Organized crime also provided a means to acquire bodies. The ghouls themselves were prohibited from killing by their religion, and they thought of themselves as natural scavengers.

By the 21st century the Manhattan ghouls lived in a state of perpetual near starvation, despite their best efforts. Their population began to dwindle, and some of them, especially the newer ghouls, began to hunt for their meat. This led to another schism, as the Keepers of the Faith, who merely scavenged, expelled the Heretics, who hunted and killed live humans. Mersenne stayed with the Keepers of the Faith.