Vampire

**Vampires** are unnatural creatures that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited while they were alive. In general, vampires hunt at night since sunlight weakens their powers. Some may have the ability to morph into a bat or a wolf. Vampires have super strength and often have a hypnotic, sensual effect on their victims. They can’t see their image in a mirror and cast no shadows.

The vampires of Earth are undead, diseased persons who are hated, hunted, and misunderstood by the living. Whether they consider themselves cursed or blessed, or whether they have given into their animalistic instincts or have sought to rid the world of the disease, vampires are nonetheless considered abominations and eccentricities of nature for some.

## Description

### Nutrition

The most defining characteristic of vampires is their unnatural, insatiable need for blood. A hybridization of a plant and vampiric blood led to plants with a similar, voracious hunger for blood, amongst other things. Human blood is preferred as it is more nutritious, but animal blood can also be drunk. Blood may not be needed to stay "alive", but doing without it can cause a vampire to become extremely weak and rabid, though some types of vampires will instead become stronger and more vampiric. However, they will still become rabid after too long without blood. The one who is fed upon may or may not have a decreased lifespan but the vampire quenches its thirst. Blood itself may not be needed to keep a vampire healthy; it is suggested that vampires are able to drain a warmblooded creature's "life force" to replenish their own; often times vampires feed on energy crystals and sometimes souls.

### Physical Appearance

All vampires look alike and distinctly different from unaffected people, as they have a pointed face with pointed ears, shallow cheeks, single chin, white hair and grey, scaly skin. Most vampires only have four teeth - two upper curved fangs and two lower smaller, their eyes are more demonic to look at and they look scary. It is said that in their true form, vampires look more monstrous, nothing like a human but more of a demon.

Vampires would often choose to hide their appearance using spells of glamour which would make them all different to look at with the exceptions being pale skin, eye colour and beardless appearance as well as attractiveness. In this form, their skin is flawless and reflective; their nails like glass; and their hair will grow back in their sleep if it is cut. As they lose all natural fluids, with the exception of blood, vampires are infertile.

They do not age physically (instead becoming more "statuesque" as they age: developing gargoylic characteristics as they age). Their features are refined and perfected (including their voices), rendering them supernaturally beautiful to lure in prey. Being technically deceased, vampires can be noticed by their lack of body heat and heartbeat. They do not require oxygen, water, or food.

Both fingernails and toenails thicken and grow at a rate tenfold to that of normal. Vampires will generally keep their nails within a centimeter in length, and also quite jagged or pointed to help them grab victims and injure opponents. Some vampires have retractable claws in which some can only irritate the enemy, while others can provide as an extra weapon and the longest one can break through shields.

The eyes of a vampire have evolved to be very powerful. The iris contains special bioluminescent bacteria that appear black in light but in complete darkness, they glow bright yellow. The iris is specially equipped to change size unevenly providing great night and day vision. The iris is usually red in color due to the blood present in it but if the vampire starves, all the blood in the eyes disappears to give life detection. If the vampire uses his powers to see something very far, the white of eyes will turn yellow. Older vampires can toggle them on and off at will in order to appear human or more threatening. Vampire tears are made of blood and a crying vampire appears vastly more terrifying with red eyes.

Not only is the taste of human blood much stronger for vampires, those with experience can even tell the following about the person it came from: general age range, gender, blood type, general diet, and the presence of adrenaline and drugs. Despite the fact that vampires experience less blood flow in their epidermal tissues, their nerve endings are actually much more sensitive than a human's. While this greatly improves their balance and reflex action, it also makes physical sensations such as touch, heat, cold and the feeling of water quite uncomfortable for them (this lead to the myth that vampires cannot cross running water which is quite true if the water is very cold or hot and the current is strong). Pain, however, is history; mundane weapons inflict neither damage nor pain on them.

Vampires have already clotted blood that does not require the heart to work; it is pumped by the skeletal system. A vampire’s digestive system is built only for blood but normal food supplies a little energy. A vampire uses its own soul energy to fuel itself and it can only be regenerated by drinking blood. A vampire’s body generates lime juice which causes a disease similar to Phytophotodermatisis and a vampire burns violently upon contact to UV rays. The vampire skeleton is pinkish in color and its work is to pump the blood in absence of the heart. The vampire’s muscles are much stronger than other beings giving them superhuman strength and speed.

The vampire’s respiratory system is way stronger than a normal man’s, as they can breathe from underwater and as a result, drowning does not kill them. A vampire’s heart does not beat and has no blood pressure. As a result, such machines that record heartbeat or blood pressure do not work. Vampires can never die of disease or human poisons. However, elf-killing poisons and elf diseases can inflict vampires but to a very small extent which is no good in killing it.

### Psychological Traits

A vampire's emotional expressions are less expressive than humans. While newborn vampires can still give birth to children that are half vampires, a vampire of age a year or two cannot have children, after a few dozen years they stop feeling love for mates and instead see all as their children, and they can grow very attached to children whom they will protect with their life being their godfather or godmother. Vampires tend to make fledglings from humans they have grown to love. The act of biting and feeding brings pleasure for both the vampire and victim, comparable to or even greater than the pinnacle of sexual release and is the most intimate experience that either will ever have. Vampires and their victims can become emotionally attached by the experience. Many victims can become addicted to vampire bites.

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 remaining unseen. Vampires can also suppress their bloodlust by meditation or eating crystals. Vampires were often given jobs of protectors and kingsguards in ancient times since they never rest and protect the ones they love with their life.

After the first few months of being a vampire, one can have no erections and neither are they attracted to mate. This is why vampires are thought to be virgins because they do not reproduce. However, older vampires can manipulate the cells of other beings to create children.

## Contracting Vampirism

*Vampirism* comes from a virus that generally affects bats and other vampires; once contracted, it takes three to twelve days till the four stages are passed and the victim dies and is reborn as a vampire. Till then, one can prevent vampirism by curing it and killing the virus.

* **Stage 1** - In this stage, the virus destroys the immune system and replaces it with its own. Victims may feel a bit weak.
* **Stage 2** - This stage occurs the about 30 hours after contraction: in this stage, the body is changed and prepared for a vampiric life. It is followed by dilated pupils, irregular heartbeat, coughs and chills, high fever, body ache, headaches, weakened sight and stomach ache.
* **Stage 3** - This stage occurs about two to three days after contraction. It is followed by weakness to sunlight and an insatiable blood-thirst.
* **Stage 4** - This stage occurs about five days after the contraction. Patient enters a coma and wakes up about 16 to 48 hours later. Upon waking up, the patient is a vampire.

## Other Ways of Creation

Besides biting, there are only a few other ways by which an individual can turn into a vampire.

### Blood Exchange

Vampires pass the "Dark Gift" to humans via exchange of blood. A single vampire must bite and feed on a human to the point of near-death. At the right moment the vampire tears or bites his or her own flesh and offers his or her own vampire blood to the dying human, who then must willingly drink the vampire's blood.

After an amount of blood is consumed, the vampire frees him/herself from the victim's grasp just as the human begins the painful transition of physical death. While the victim's natural bodily functions cease, the vampire's blood in his or her veins infuses him or her with the magic which reanimates him or her as a newborn vampire.

## Powers and Abilities

### Common Powers

Abilities common to vampires are:

* **Vampirism** - Vampires have sharp, pointed, retractable fangs that extend beyond their human teeth. Vampires are said to mainly bite the victim's neck, extracting the blood from a main artery.
* **Superhuman Strength** - The superior physical strength of a vampire compared to that of a human is a prominent theme. They generally have the advantage of superior strength when in direct physical combat with a human; they can single-handedly lift a grown man off the ground and throw him across a room with enough speed and force to send him through a wall or across an alley, they can also knock them unconscious with a single chop, snap their necks with one hand, and crush their bones, all with little to no effort.
* **Superhuman Speed** - Vampires are extremely quick, moving faster than the human eye can possibly see. They can run in excess speeds and in their human form out run many beings such as ghosts and demons, they're significantly faster than a human werewolf and slightly faster than a turned one thanks to their stature. The creature’s sheer speed, combined with its unnatural stealth, makes it impossible for the vampire’s prey to detect or escape from the vampire until it is too late. Vampires are able to dodge bullets, and react with unnatural quickness to any threat, due to the creature’s superhuman reflexes. In order to attain more speed, a vampire can take the form of bats.
* **Superhuman Stamina** - Vampires are able to move at great speed for long periods, and it is nearly impossible to tire the vampire, due to its preternatural degree of endurance. They do not need to sleep and do not require food or oxygen. It means that drowning would never kill a vampire.
* **Superhuman Durability** - Vampires are incapable of being slain by most forms of conventional injury, including firearms, blades or lesser spells. Furthermore, the vampire cannot feel the pain that would result from such attacks. Gunfire has no effect on the immortal whatsoever, serving only to slow the creature down. Likewise, blades don’t affect the vampire at all, unless a silver blade pierces the heart or removes the head.
* **Superhuman Senses** - Vampire’s senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch are of supernatural keenness, comparable on many levels to a bat’s. The vampire can see with perfect clarity in the darkness of the night, to the point of being able to detect the bodily heat emanations from its victims. The creature’s hearing is comparable to a bat or an owl, possessing a level of sensitivity on par with the bat’s own echo-sensitivity and they even have a sonar system just in case they are blinded. The aampire’s sense of smell is as acute as that of a wolf or a dog’s, enabling the creature to track its prey for miles by the scent of the victim’s blood alone, a sensation that the vampire relishes. The Vampire is also able to tell individual people apart by the scent of their blood coursing through their veins or bodily odors. The aampire’s sense of touch is amazingly acute, as the creature can feel the heartbeat of a potential victim through thick walls, or it can detect the vibrations of a vampire hunter’s footsteps and the direction of the footsteps, enabling the aampire to either escape or prepare an ambush for the would-be hunter. In addition to its five senses, the vampire possesses several preternatural senses. A vampire can instinctively sense impending danger, usually posed by humans. Vampires can feel the heartbeat of a person and see the blood and brain activity, allowing them to save lives of people. Vampires require a very little amount of blood to tell the age, race, gender, blood type, health status and eating habits.
* **Scaling Walls** - Vampires can scale walls like spiders and still act like they were walking on the ground with their capes and clothes falling towards their feet instead of the soil. They can detach at will to land on the ground and carry on their work from there.
* **Hypnosis** - Through the use of hypnosis, Vampires are able to dominate the mind and will of a human by simple eye contact, soft speech or a simple wave of the hand. The Vampire’s bite seems to have an anesthetic effect on the victim; giving the creature the time it needs to feed and also instantly sealing the cut to prevent loss of blood and keeping no memory of it. To dominate a human, the vampire needs only make eye contact with its victim for a few seconds and then bite to spread vampirism. However, the stronger the human’s will, the longer hypnosis takes. If necessary, the Vampire can completely crush the human mind or destroy the individual’s sanity, leaving little more than a drooling lunatic. In the same manner, the Vampire can create a human slave. This slave is totally obedient to his master’s will, to the point of being willing to sacrifice everything for his master’s safety, including his or her life. Such individuals inevitably lose their minds due to the vampire’s power over them.
* **Immortality** - A vampire being already dead cannot die again. Their lifespan multiplies very fast rendering them immortal in life and their immunity to mundane weapons and instant healing renders them invulnerable to most weapons and their part dead bodies can make others mistake for them as dead men when they fall on the ground.
* **Shapeshifting** - Vampires can fly as a cloud of bats, mist or a single giant or small bat. Vampires can take the form of rats, bats, mist or smoke in cloud form (whole body or occasionally part of their body) or a single giant or regular bat, wolf (or a werewolf-looking creature), giant or regular rat or a bat-like demon. Some can even turn their hands. Vampires can call upon bats to do their will and can transform into a swarm of bats at will. Their clothing and anything they hold, like swords, etc. also dematerializes into bats with them. This enables them to fly. Bat powers give vampires a lot of new qualities like the ability to move very fast, turn invisible for some time, and actually fly. Elder vampires can also turn into one single bat to remain stealthier and others can turn to giant bat-like demons. Vampires are known to embalm mortals into themselves to carry them as bats too.
* **Regenerative Healing Factor** - The vampire has supernatural regenerative capabilities, which allows the creature to recover from injuries that would permanently incapacitate or even kill a human. Poison, suffocation, extreme cold, aging, drowning, or disease cannot kill the vampire, as the creature is already dead.
* **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, or both their canines and their premolars. 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.

### Uncommon Powers

* **Telepathy** - Vampires can read the minds of mortals. Older vampires can read the minds of younger, weaker vampires. Vampires can also use telepathy to "whisper" to each other by speaking into each other's minds; a way to silently communicate even over great distances.
* **Atmokinesis** - Vampires are able to control the weather within limits. They could direct the fog, summon a powerful storm, control the direction and the force of the wind, or even call down bolts of lightning to strike its enemies. Dragons however can counteract their ability and summon rains.
* **Telekinesis** - Vampires can move objects with their minds. Most of them are known to choke people without their hands and even lift people; vampires even go a step further to pull or push objects away and some like throwing their blades towards enemies and then calling them back.
* **Flight** - The unique ability known to older vampires to defy gravity and move towards anywhere in the air. Newborn vampires have a lesser variation of this power; they can land silently and carefully by floating down to the ground during falls.
* **Necromancy**- Vampires can raise the dead and create dead thralls. Some can only resurrect one or two servants while others can create entire armies of dead. Since vampires have dark energy, bodies resurrected by them lose their skin and flesh making them look like zombies.
* **Biokinesis** - Older vampires can influence the cells of a living or dead person to create life. This is the process by which older vampires reproduce; vampires have the ability to save a man from dying by using the cells and life force of another dying person and bringing into life the dying man. Vampires can also influence life to reproduce and create their own children of either pure light, pure dark or grey nature. Some vampires can survive any condition under which others would surely die and that includes their own regeneration from a single cell, they will still forget most of their things and need to feed on vampire blood.
* **Animal Control** - Besides turning into animals, vampires can control the minds of animals. This may include from petty spells like greensight and spying to very powerful spells like animal control (up to thousands). While fledglings use small creatures like dogs, wolves, mountain lions, rats, bats and birds as their companions; ascendants use creatures like undead hounds, giant spiders, gargoyles and other predators of that kind. Elder vampires have the ability to control even stronger creatures like trolls and even dragons as their servants.
* **Blood Bond** - A blood exchange between a vampire and human (not before the human dies) will form a blood bond. The vampire will be able to sense the human's thoughts and emotions, knowing if that human is in any type of harm or distress - for eternity. The human will also experience sexual dreams about that vampire.

### Weaknesses

In spite of their superhuman powers of strength, resilience, and virtual immortality, vampires possess weaknesses and limitations that threaten their very being and give humans advantages over them.

* **Silver** - The touch of silver burns a vampire's skin and causes great pain.
* **Garlic** - Vampires are repulsed by the scent and taste of garlic.
* **Vervain** - A mystic herb called vervain is poisonous to vampires. It burns their skin on contact. If a human is holding, wearing, or has vervain in their system, a vampire cannot hypnotize them. Vervain can be mixed with a vampire's drink, which, if drunk, will severely weaken them.
* **Religious Iconography** - The sight of a cross or any other religious symbol will repel vampires and even burn them on contact with their skin. By holding some form of crucifix in front of a vampire, a potential victim can cause the vampire to halt, or even to turn and flee. A cross presented strongly enough can even cause a vampire to be unable to return to their coffin, destroying them at sunrise. Direct physical contact with a crucifix will severely burn a vampire, but will not destroy them.
* **Sunlight** - The vampires are extremely sensitive to the sun and they would burst into flames if they are exposed to the direct sunlight. Upon touch to UV rays vampires burst into flames lose their skin and crumble to dust, stone, ash, bones, or gooey piles, and some even vaporize. They could counter this with daylight rings which have a stone called lapis lazuli.
* **Dead Man's Blood** - The use of blood from the recently deceased can also be used as a method to incapacitate vampires briefly.
* **Stake** - Wound to the heart was fatal to a vampire. An iron stake can knock a hole in the vampire and weaken it to some point while a normal wooden stake a silver, ash, hawthorn, or oak stake can kill a vampire when dug into the heart.
* **Exsanguination/Blood Loss** - If drained completely of their blood, vampires can become comatosed or even die. If a vampire entered a place (That was not a public area) without invitation and the invite remained absent for too long, the vampire began to bleed through it's pores until it was completely drained and dead.
* **Reflection** - Vampires, as well as the clothes they currently wear, can't be seen on reflective surfaces like mirrors, glass, or water. However, vampires can be seen in photographs, daguerreotypes, and video tapes. Vampires do have reflections in certain dimensions, such as Pylea, as its physics differ from those of Earth.
* **Dismemberment** - Dismemberment is a grisly process that involves hacking off the vampire’s limbs, one by one, to prevent them from rising from the grave and attacking the living. Obviously, any vampire is going to find it to be impossible to get up, wander around, and feed without its arms or legs. Ideally, this should be done with a sword or a woodsman’s axe.
* **Holy Water** - Water that has been blessed by a clergyman will burn a vampire if it makes contact with one. A sufficient supply of such water will likely destroy one entirely.
* **Hunger/Starvation** - The vampires could become weak and sickly looking if they do not feed on blood and they could eventually die from starvation.
* **Desiccation** - If drained completely of their blood, vampires can become desiccated or even die. They can be desiccated by the Desiccation Spell.
* **Invitation** - If a vampire entered a place (That was not a public area) without invitation and the invite remained absent for too long, the vampire began to bleed through it's pores until it was completely drained and dead. The vampires needed a verbal invitation ("You could come in") for each separate entrance to a private domicile (A window and a door). The vampire is unable to enter a house without first being verbally invited to enter. So, as long as people don't let the creature in, they remain safe.
* **Fire** - The vampires could be killed through immolation. Fire causes vampires a great deal of pain and injury; they can, however, quickly heal from even the worst burns if given time and blood.
* **Decapitation** - A vampire can be killed completely if its head is cut out and body burned. The vampire’s body will keep on walking as a headless zombie till it finds its head and after that the vampire will be reborn.