Pythagoras of Samos

He was one of the rare souls to reincarnate, and, this time, he was one of the still rarer ones that remembered the earlier lives. So, when he died, he was expecting to reincarnate again. He was surprised and dismayed when he did not. It took him a long time to figure out that reincarnation depends on a degree of passivity in the transmigrating soul, a passivity he had lost in his last life, in which his profound meditations had taught him to feel and control his use of prana. By the time he figured it out, an assumed passivity was no longer any use; his karma had changed.

He decided the best thing he could do was continue his self-education. He set out for Athens, then Egypt once more, then Babylon. Travel was hard for a ghost, but he could gather the necessary prana by meditating, especially on his favorite topic: number. He made slow progress this way, but he was patient. He would not steal prana.

Not steal, no. But he came up with another way to get prana. One of his mathematical interests, unrecorded by history, was in probability. He had realized that chance, luck, could be quantified. He had been delighted: it was watching Order, Number, invade, conquer, and colonize Chaos. And, even though he got no further than quantifying odds as ratios, it gave him a considerable advantage; he could have made his fortune as a gambler. In life, he did not deign to.

Now, though, he had a motive. Starting with a couple of obols found in the street and summoning up the strength to manifest, he appeared in a dockside tavern and, taken for living, joined in the gambling. In a few nights, he had money to win and lose. He was careful to win just a little more than he lost. When the others were out of money, he would smile and offer to wager "a good night's sleep." They thought he was being generous, charitable. But he collected, and they either did not sleep that night or slept without refreshment, while he grew stronger.

After one or two such experiences, the dockside gamblers decided he was a magician. He did not disabuse them. Some felt that, magician or no, he was a very generous man with a wager. And some of these, he saw, were ruining themselves with their gambling. To such, he would come in their unrestful dreams, taking the prana and sermonizing against prodigality. Nightmares are bad enough; boring guilt-trip nightmares that you can't escape, with imagery of future destitution and shame, are worse. Some, he managed to scare straight.

In a few years, he managed to accumulate enough power to manifest continually, if he wished, and move freely; he accumulated enough wealth to set up a household for himself ~ all the easier when he needed no food, fire, or clothes. He settled in Sais, Egypt, though traveling often, to make his tours of gambling halls as much as to seek out books and their authors.

Euclid delighted him.

In Egypt, he studied djinn, ka'u, and ka-gods, magic and alchemy. He took djinn as his house servants and grew disillusioned with much magic and alchemy.

He heard of the Israelites, of course, and was much taken with the idea of worshipping the One. When the seventy scholars of the Septuagint started their project, he haunted them invisibly, struck their acquaintance visibly, and taught them gematria. Afterward, he journeyed to Jerusalem, to see the Temple to the One. There, much to his surprise, he dreamed, or rather had a vision. The bright spirit that appeared to him told him, "When the numbers of Daniel are summed, go to Patmos."

In due course, when the sixty-nine sevens were run, he went to Patmos, and there met Cassandra, and settled down to wait.

Pythagoras is a ghost vampire and barely a vampire at all: he wins prana fairly by gambling for it. He is expert in the scholarly side of occultism and knows just how worthless most of it is. He also knows a great deal about the spirit world, though not nearly so much as Cassandra. He is enormously learned and keeps up with it; his house in Sais was mostly library, and his new home in Patmos is the same.

He has no supernatural vulnerabilities. He can appear in waking life or dreams but has virtually no physical power beyond what can open a door, page through a book, write out an equation, or throw a pair of dice. If he isn't careful, he has no shadow or reflection. He never has any weight. If he isn't prepared, he's impalpable.