Van Argiano is a Frenchman and the head scientist studying chiropterans for Cinq Flèches. He was in charge of the development of Delta 67, working under Solomon and with his assistant Archer. After Solomon defected from the group, Amshel appoints him to the head of the Cinq Flèches American branch. Despite knowing their true nature and plans, Van sided with the chiropterans and aided them in their efforts to spread chiropterans around the world.
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The specific epithet honours Leslie S. Hall, a professor at the University of Quennsland, who was noted for his contributions to the study of chiropterans.
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Julia Silverstein is a medical doctor working for the Red Shield. She is first seen in the series acting as Saya's doctor and supervising Saya's blood transfusions. She is committed to researching the true nature of chiropterans to help destroy them. Her supervisor and mentor, Dr. Collins, defects to Cinq Flèches wanting to be able to publish his research and because he disagrees with the idea of killing chiropterans.
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Hipposideros winsburyorum is a hipposiderid species of bat known by fossil specimens, one of the many new taxa of chiropterans discovered in the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. The species existed during the Pliocene.
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Though she appears to be a normal teenager, any injuries she sustains heal almost instantly and she must receive regular blood transfusions to remain healthy. When a chiropteran attacks her school, she finds her life turned upside down. She is reunited with her chevalier Haji, though she doesn't remember him, and learns that her blood can kill the chiropterans. She is approached by David, from the Red Shield, who tells her it is her duty to kill chiropterans because she is the only one who can.
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80: 221—234. Mohd. Azlan J., Ibnu Maryanto, Agus P. Kartono and M.T. Abdullah. 2003 Diversity, Relative Abundance and Conservation of Chiropterans in Kayan Mentarang National Park, East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Sarawak Museum Journal 79: 251-265.
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She plans to put Saya in her play just to get Kai to come see it. After briefly bonding with Saya, Mao is horrified when she witnesses Saya recover from mortal injury by drinking her blood when the play is attacked by chiropterans.
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Joel was killed by Diva in 1883 on his seventy-second birthday after Saya released her from the tower to sing at his birthday party. Leadership of the Red Shield is passed down from father to son, with the current leader being Joel Goldschmidt VI. Many of its members have endured tragic encounters with chiropterans in the field and all members of the Red Shield carry an item containing a piece of red crystal taken from the crystallized body of destroyed chiroptera. According to the Blood+ light novels, the organization's name is taken from the idea that the members are Saya's shield of blood, incapable of killing chiropterans themselves but willing to die to protect Saya.
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Working against both sides are the Schiff, a group of escaped artificial chiropterans created by Diva's group who attacks both sides in search of the blood of Saya, Diva, or one of their chevaliers in hopes that one will be the right blood to save them from a fatal and painful disease they call the Thorn.
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American Museum Novitates 3857: 1–43. doi:10.1206/3857.1. The largest forms such as Witwatia schlosseri were comparable in size and possibly ecology to the modern Vampyrum spectrum. Witwatia is not related to Aegyptonycteris, a contemporary genus of similarly sized giant bat, indicating that the Fayum Depression environment was home to at least two lineages of large sized chiropterans that developed gigantism independently.
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The collectors, A. Baynes and C. G. Dawe, obtained the specimen at 4:30 in the afternoon on 7 August 1979. The author of the species named it for the mammologist John Edwards Hill of the British Museum, who had assisted Kitchener and previously worked on the taxonomy of Australian chiropterans. Other common names for the species include Hill's tomb bat, and a variant as Hill's sheathtail bat.
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The Red Shield is an organization dedicated to eliminate Diva and chiropterans. The organization was started by the grandchildren of Joel Goldschmidt, who first found Saya and Diva in 1833 and raised them at the Zoo. He separated the sisters after birth, raising Saya like his own daughter, while locking the unnamed up in a tower, for scientific reasons. Joel took care of Saya, while his assistant Amshel provided for Diva's basic needs.
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Armed with her special katana, Saya embarks on a journey with her family, friends, allies, and her chevalier Haji, to rid the world of the Chiropteran threat and recover her identity. The course of the journey reveals the background history of the Chiropterans and Saya's mysterious past, which extends into the mid-19th century. Over the course of the series, Saya travels across the world from Japan to Vietnam, Russia, France, and finally the U.S.
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Van is often shown to be eating some kind of hard candy, sometimes offering some to colleagues. However, he was betrayed at the Metropolitan Opera House and was not told of the plans to turn people there into chiropterans. He was left to face the monsters on his own by his American contact, Secretary of Defense Grant, but is saved by David. At the end of the series, he is shown being taken to trial to face charges for his crimes.
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She rapes Riku, and kills him by giving him her blood which crystallizes him. A year after this attack, when the Red Shield is able to regroup, Diva has changed her physical appearance to resemble Riku and retains that appearance until her final battle with Saya. Diva becomes an opera singer in New York, sponsored by the Group. Cinq Flèches has spread the Delta 67 agent, which can turn people into chiropterans, across various populations of the world, including the United States.
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When George is kidnapped, Kai steals his father's M1911 pistol to try to rescue him. David confiscates it, but later returns it to show that he feels Kai had matured enough to handle it. Kai uses it as his primary weapon for the remainder of the series. After the destruction of the Red Shield, he lives with Lewis and David in an orphanage in London, actively hunting chiropterans with Lewis and honing his skills as a soldier in the war against Diva and her minions.
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Two Japanese light novel series were commission and created for the Blood+ anime series produced by Production I.G and Aniplex. The first, also named Blood+, written by Ryō Ikehata with illustrations by Chizu Hashii, is a four volume series and the official novel adaptation of the anime series. It expands on the events of the anime and gives greater background information on the battle against chiropterans. The first volume was released in Japan on May 1, 2006 by Kadokawa Shoten under their male-oriented Sneaker Bunko label.
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From left to right: Lewis, Julia, David, Hagi, Saya, Kai, Mao, and Okamura, as they appear in the second half of the series The Blood+ anime, light novel, and manga series features an extensive cast of characters designed by Chizu Hashii and created by Production I.G and Aniplex. The series is set within fictionalized versions of various real-life cities, including Okinawa, Japan; Hanoi, Vietnam; Yekaterinburg, Russia; Paris, France; London, England; Fayetteville, North Carolina; and New York City The central character of the series is Saya Otonashi, a seemingly ordinary teenage girl who was adopted into the family of Kai and Riku Miyagusuku a year before the series begins and who cannot remember her past. Her life is dramatically changed when she learns that she is a chiropteran—a vampire-like creature—who was born in 1833, survives by drinking the blood of others or receiving it through blood transfusion, and is the only one who can destroy other chiropterans and her twin sister Diva. Saya and Diva are the "queens", the descendants of a line of supremely powerful chiropterans that are always born as twin females.
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At the Metropolitan Opera House, Diva is set to perform a live broadcast which would cause much of the world's population to turn into chiropterans. The Red Shield and Saya are able to stop the broadcast, and the sisters have their final battle, while Diva's chevalier Nathan watches nearby with the babies. The fight ends as Diva and Saya pierce one another with their swords, which each had coated with their own blood. Saya is unharmed by the attack, due to Diva's blood having lost its power when she became pregnant.
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There are two Japanese light novel adaptations of the Blood+ series. Blood+, written by Ryō Ikehata with illustrations by Chizu Hashii, is the four volume official novel adaptation of the anime series, expanding upon the events of the fifty-episode anime series and giving greater background on the battle against chiropterans. The first volume was released in Japan on May 1, 2006 by Kadokawa Shoten under their male oriented Kadokawa Sneaker Bunko label. The remaining volumes released every four months until the final volume was released on May 1, 2007.
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Solomon Goldsmith was a medical doctor who was introduced to Diva by Amshel in 1917 during the Russian Revolution. At this time, he became one of her chevaliers, after which he wears only white clothing as a symbol of his being Diva's chevalier because it was what he was wearing when he met her. At the time, he wanted to free himself from seeing humans kill each other, but afterwards, he started seeing humans as insignificant and beneath him. As time passed, he realized the world of the chiropterans is just as full of war as the human one.
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David wields a Smith & Wesson Model 500 magnum revolver as his primary weapon. Carrying a handgun this powerful and large is unusual for an agent, but since chiropterans cannot be killed by normal means Red Shield personnel must rely on the knockdown power of their guns to keep the monsters at bay. When the Red Shield's headquarters are destroyed and Saya is believed to have gone down with it, David sinks into a deep depression and becomes an alcoholic. Hagi helps David snap his world back into focus, though, after Hagi makes an observation about David's unhappiness, and he picks up his gun and is able to fight once more.
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In 1870, Amshel purchases a twelve-year-old boy named Hagi from his parents to become Saya's companion and friend, though she later falls in love with him and vice versa. During a birthday party for Joel in 1883, Saya releases Diva so that she can sing for Joel; Diva, however, slaughters everyone in the Goldschmidt house while Saya and Hagi are out looking for Joel's favorite flower. Realizing that Diva is a monster, Saya spends her periods of activity hunting Diva to try to kill her, her chevaliers, and any chiropterans they have created. During a flashback dream, she is hunting Diva after the presumed death of Grigori after the Russian Revolution.
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Aiding Saya in this century-long quest is an organization called the Red Shield, with a man named David assigned to be Saya's primary "handler." With Saya forced to return to her former life, she is reunited with Hagi, her chevalier—a special form of chiropteran created by feeding a human the blood of a queen which causes a powerful bond to form and compels the chevalier to serve and protect his queen at all costs. As the series progresses, it is revealed that Diva has five chevaliers to aid her: Amshel Goldsmith, Solomon Goldsmith, Karl Fei-Ong, James Ironside, and Nathan Mahler. They have formed their own organization, Cinq Flèches, which they use to create additional chiropterans from Diva's blood.
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The genus was erected in 1837 by Charles L. Bonaparte. In the first systematic revision of the genus, published in a monograph of Miniopterus in 1858 by Robert F. Tomes, the author reallocated specimens and described new taxa. A new systematic arrangement was produced in an extensive study of poorly known chiropterans of the Indo-Austral region by James E. Hill in 1985, the greater resolution of the genus being determined by the British Museum of Natural History's acquisition of new series of specimens collected in Fiji, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia and the extensive collection made in New Guinea by ecologist Ben Gaskell on "Operation Drake". Recognised as a very widely dispersed group with distinct morphology, biology and genetic characters, the number of species and systematic arrangements varied between still contradictory treatments.
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