Vampire

**Vampires** are magically reanimated human corpses which are inhabited by the spirits of the deceased person and who closely resemble the living human they were before their transformation. Vampires feed and survive on the blood of the living, typically on that of humans, and they can also transform other humans into more of their kind by sharing their own blood with them.

## Creation

A human who has consumed vampire blood in some way (whether by drinking it, having it poured into their open wound, or by being injected with it) and has subsequently died with the blood in their system will be magically revived as an undead vampire, just like the vampire who sired them. The exact nature of the human's death is irrelevant to this process; the only condition that must be met is that the body has to be more-or-less intact and able to function once they reawaken in transition, though the upper limits of physical damage upon a human body by which vampirism can recover has yet to be defined.

In order to complete the transition into a vampire, the person must then consume a significant amount of human blood, at least a sip's worth, within the next twenty-four hours, or else they will die. Vampires can only feed on human blood in order to complete their transformation—animal blood or vampire blood is not sufficient to finish the transformation from human to vampire. However, in this case, "human blood" can include the blood of a human witch, as was proven by Brandon North, who completed his transformations by drinking the blood of Katerina North, respectively. Additionally, the blood need not be from a live human.

A vampire in transition is neither truly living nor truly dead until they make their choice to either complete their transition or to abstain from feeding and ultimately die. This puts the semi-vampire in a strange liminal space between the two states that can affect them in different ways.

## Physiology

Blood is the main component of a vampire's diet, be it human, animal or vampire blood. If a vampire fails to regularly drink blood, their body will become severely weakened, and will ultimately desiccate into mummification until they are able to get blood into their system.

Blood (especially human blood) does not only satisfy a vampire’s thirst, but it also heightens their supernatural abilities, making them stronger, faster, and able to heal much more quickly than they would after not eating for a significant period of time. The longer a vampire abstains from blood, the more likely the vampire will becoming feral until they are eventually unable to resist feeding on whomever they come upon. In many cases, a vampire who has been starved for a long period and is risking desiccation will eventually become so overwhelmed with hunger that the lose all sense of their humanity and rationality altogether and finally give into their bloodlust. It has been demonstrated that vampire blood, just as with human and animal blood, can be used to revive a vampire who has been desiccated (even if they ordinarily do not partake in the consumption of vampire blood), and it can also help a badly injured vampire heal more quickly if human or animal blood is not available. However, human blood is most compatible with a vampire's dietary needs, and because of this, the majority of vampires rely on it as their sole food source. Despite their main food source being referred to as "human blood," this term also extends to the blood of both witches and werewolves who are in their human form, as their blood seems to be functionally identical to that of regular humans.

Vampires can also become intoxicated by drugs such as alcohol and marijuana just as humans can, although they do have much higher tolerances due to their accelerated healing, which rapidly regenerates the cells damaged by these drugs which causes the sensation of being drunk or high. In fact, most vampires frequently drink alcohol throughout the day to help them deal with their perpetual hunger, much in the way that some vampires eat human food to help curb their cravings.

## Nature

Vampires have the capacity to be extremely feral, predatory creatures, and can be more beast-like and savage than their human appearance suggests. They growl, hiss, snarl, and curl their lips back when provoked, baring their fangs as a sign of aggression when faced by a threat.

## Attitudes Toward Humans

Vampires generally coexist with humans due to their shared origins and appearances. Humans are mostly oblivious to the existence of vampires, which makes it easier for vampires to commingle with their human cohorts without detection or exposure. Most of the few people who do know about vampires have either been killed to ensure their silence, compelled to forget their encounters with them, or, in some cases, are compelled not to speak of it to anyone, which lessens the chances that the vampire species will be exposed to the public.

## Powers and Abilities

* **Super Strength**: Vampires are noticeably much stronger than humans and slowly grow stronger as they grow older. They always have the advantage of superior strength in direct combat with a human. Even new vampires who are still in transition can toss an average-size, fully-grown human across a room with great speed and force. Their other feats include single-handedly lifting grown men high off the ground by the throat and snapping their necks, cutting off a person's head with their bare hands, and ripping out internal organs such as hearts with little to no effort. Their strength is also more powerful than that of Werewolves in their human form. Their strength allows them to jump higher and further than any natural creature. Vampires who feed on humans are stronger than those who feed on animal blood.

* **Super Speed**: Vampires are much faster than humans, and werewolves in human form. Vampires can accelerate their movements to cover short distances in an instant, usually faster than the human eye can see. When running across long distances, they appear as vibrating blurs of motion allowing them to appear or vanish quickly and quietly. Their reflexes and dexterity are similarly heightened, allowing them to catch certain projectiles such as arrows and thrown stakes in the air with ease. Like their strength, their speed also increases with age.

* **Super Agility**: Vampires possess super-human agility. They have shown that they can move quickly, jump very high, climb, and run incredibly fast without difficulty or exhaustion. Vampires can jump with their super speed too. Vampires that feed on human blood can jump much higher than vampires that feed on animal blood.

* **Super Senses**: Vampires have extremely keen senses of hearing, sight, smell, and taste that far exceed those of humans and werewolves. They can hear whispered conversations, even ones in far of buildings and on phones, though most vampires typically learn how to tune out most ambient noises when it's not necessary to hear them.

* **Super Durability**: Vampires can take a great amount of physical damage without being slowed down. Even vampires who have been shot with wooden bullets, which have a weakening effect on vampires, have been seen to continue fighting so long as they were not shot in the heart or the head. Vampires still react to physical force in a human manner, particularly young vampires, who will occasionally be affected even by human-strength-level force. Vampires can also still be stunned and dazed by strikes and trauma, though their tolerance for it will increase as they get older.

* **Healing Factor**: Vampires recover tissue from any form of physical damage to their bodies within seconds, though they still feel the pain of a wound before it heals. Vampires can snap their bones back into place after they have been broken and have been seen to fully recover from gunshots, stab wounds, and torso impalement very quickly, so long as they had consumed a regular diet of human blood prior to the injury. Those vampires who feed on animals will still heal much faster than a human, but their injuries, especially severe ones, will take much longer to heal than a vampire who feeds on human blood.

* **Immortality**: A vampire stops aging once turned. Upon their transformation, vampires become immune to all conventional illness, diseases, viruses and infections. While vampires who were cancer-free as humans will be immune to cancer after they are turned, those humans who were turned while they had cancer will not only still have it as a vampire, but their newly-enhanced healing factor will accelerate the progression of the cancer cells over two-fold, nearly always causing the cancer-stricken vampire to kill themselves to end their suffering.

* **Enhanced Emotions**: Vampires experience emotions more powerfully than humans. Emotions like love, joy, and happiness are magnified for vampires, allowing them to live life more intensely. This ability allows vampires to feel emotions at their peak regardless of their age. Conversely, sadness, depression, guilt, fear and anger are also amplified, causing many vampires to become so overwhelmed that they "turn off" their humanity to block out the more painful emotions. After time and practice, the overwhelming sensations of heightened emotions fade as the vampire learns to overcome their emotions without turning off their humanity all together.

* **Emotional Control**: Vampires have the supernatural ability to remove or dull their emotions by "turning off" or "switching off" their humanity, which is directly connected to their emotions. Doing so allows them to block out their more negative emotions, such as fear and guilt, allowing them to feed and kill without remorse, go against any opponent without fear, and relieve themselves of painful feelings such as grief, loss, depression, and shame. A vampire without their emotions is far more calculating and direct than one who keeps them on. However, the vampire can become a remorseless killer, and are almost unrecognizable from the person they truly are, as blocking out negative emotions also causes their positive emotions to become dulled or nonexistent as well. Vampires are capable of turning their humanity back on and bringing back their emotions, but it is difficult as a result of the fact that they will be bombarded with all of their repressed emotions in addition to the guilt of anything they did without their humanity (such as killing or torturing innocent people or loved ones) with enhanced intensity. This ability fades with time and vampires who are over 500 years old have said that they have lost the ability to turn off their humanity altogether.

* **Mind Compulsion**: Vampires have the ability to influence and control thoughts, emotions, and behavior and can alter or erase memories. There is a sort of hierarchy as to how this ability works. Vampire cannot compel hybrids or other vampires, though they can compel the other aforementioned species. However, no vampire can compel a witch or a warlock, or a werewolf.

* **Sire Bond**: Although rare among them, sire bonds can be formed when a human is turned with the blood of the vampire for whom they had strong romantic feelings before they were turned. Those vampires or hybrids with a sire bond are supernaturally loyal to their sires to the point that they will go out of their way to do whatever their sire asks them to do, even if they don't actually want to do it. However, this bond doesn't affect how they truly feel about their sire, it only affects their behavior.

* **Telepathy**: Vampires have a limited form of telepathy that allows them to easily enter the minds of humans, and with more effort, the minds of witches, werewolves, doppelgängers. They can also enter the minds of other vampires, though this ability is dependent on the vampire being younger or weaker than the one using telepathy. Other ways to weaken a vampire to use telepathy on them are to starve them/drain them of blood, inject them with vervain, or expose them to werewolf venom. It is one of the hardest abilities to master, and because of this, it is usually the last of the mind-control-related abilities a vampire learns after becoming proficient in mind compulsion. Normally, this ability works through tactile contact, usually by the vampire placing the palms of his or her hands on the temples of the vampire whose mind they want to enter. The vampire then closes their eyes and focuses on the information they wish to seek, allowing them to sort through their victims' memories until they see what they're looking for. However, Brandon and Kaiaphas have been shown to mentally communicate with others from a short distance without tactile contact in order to send distress calls and mental images during emergency situations.
	+ **Dream Manipulation**: Vampires can also use their power of telepathy to control dreams and the subconscious. This is an aspect of telepathy that is much easier to learn, and with it, a vampire has the ability to produce and modify dreams, bestow nightmares and lucid dreaming, distort people's perception of reality and trap someone in their dreams. Vampires can manipulate and enter the subconscious of other vampires and even an Original vampire if they are vulnerable enough. However, this is a learned skill that requires practice to achieve.
	+ **Illusions**: Vampires have the power to trick the minds of other younger vampires into seeing/feeling things that aren't actually happening, such as when Brandon made Kaiaphas believe he was suffocating.
* **True Face**: A vampire's true face is the appearance they are hiding under their normal human face. When a vampire's true face is revealed, the sclera of their eyes turns blood-red, dark veins appear under their eyes as the blood pumps forcefully through them, and their canine teeth extend into razor-sharp fangs. On some occasions, a vampire's fang teeth can include both their canines and their lateral incisors. A vampire's true face can be revealed whenever they wish, but it will appear against their will whenever they are aroused by the scent of blood, or are feeling intense emotions such as fear, anger, lust, sadness, etc. A vampire's fangs are extremely sharp which gives them the ability to tear into almost any substance (including and especially flesh) and tear off limbs. A vampire's true face will appear for the first time either while they drink human blood for the first time or shortly afterward. With the fangs come the darkened veins under the eyes as well.

## Weaknesses

* **Animal Blood**: Animal blood, while somewhat satisfying a vampire's hunger and sustaining their undead life, will make the vampire considerably weaker than they would be if they had drank human blood, causing their physical abilities to be inferior to a human-blood-consuming vampire, making them heal much more slowly, and making their compulsion less effective.

* **Broken Neck**: Breaking a vampire's neck will not kill them, but it will render in a death like state for varying amounts of time, depending on the diet and age of the person in question.

* **Decapitation**: Dismembering or manually removing the head of a vampire will result in instant and permanent death.

* **Desiccation**: Vampires who abstain from blood for extended amounts of time will eventually desiccate and mummify. Witches can use magic to desiccate a vampire.

* **Fire**: Vampires are highly flammable and sensitive to fire, and will quickly burn and die from it if the flames are not extinguished in time. This quality has been proven to be useful in disposing of the remains of a dead vampire without any physical evidence.

* **Heart Extraction**: Removing the heart of a vampire will result in permanent death. Vampires have the strength to plunge their hands right through the flesh of humans (including witches), werewolves, or other vampires, allowing them to punch their hand through the thorax of a person and pull out their heart.

* **Magic**: Vampires are susceptible to the powers of witchcraft. Witches have been seen to use magic to cause agonizing pain by inducing aneurysms in their brain or muscle spasms, telekinetically ripping out their hearts or snapping their necks, magically increasing their hunger for blood to unbearable levels, setting them ablaze with a single thought, and desiccating them to the point of mummification.

* **Physical Trauma**: Minor physical injuries such as gunshots, stab wounds and broken bones will cause a pain and also slow them down. However, this is momentary as they will heal completely within seconds so long as they haven't been weakened by other means such as vervain or werewolf bites.

* **Vervain**: Exposure to or ingestion of vervain causes a vampire to become severely feverish and weak to the point that it can even hinder their healing abilities as well. Also, physical contact with vervain will burn a vampire's skin. Vampires cannot compel anyone who has ingested vervain or has it on their person.

* **Werewolf Bite**: The bite of a werewolf, which involves injecting a toxic venom into the wound, is extremely lethal to vampires. It will cause them to hallucinate, grow severely weak and go rabid until it kills them. Isabella North's tribrid blood is the only surefire way to cure the bite.

* **Wood**: Wounding a vampire with a wooden weapon such as wooden bullets will incapacitate them, and it will take longer for them to heal their injuries than if the wounds were caused by any other substance. Stabbing a vampire through the heart with a wooden stake will result in instantaneous and permanent death.

## Known Vampires

* Isabella North
* Brandon North
* Elias Langdon
* Elijah Evans

## Trivia

* As predators, vampires enjoy stalking and toying with their victims before biting and drinking their blood.
* Vampires are excellent predators, as they can hunt their victims while using their supernatural abilities to remaining undetected.

## References

*The **Vampire** article uses material from the "Vampire" article from the Vampire Diaires wiki at FANDOM and is licensed under the Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.*