Culture

• Human history is generally the same as in the real world, and the overall state of the world is similar to our own, except for the presence of supernatural beings such as vampires.
• People know about vampires. They aren’t kept secret from the world. However, they largely exist outside of human society. Most people disregard the threat posed by them the same way that they disregard the threat posed by natural disasters and wild animals when they’re not currently posing a threat.
• Vampires are feared. People know that being bitten by a vampire is either a death sentence or will otherwise destroy one’s life and relationships through enthrallment or even being turned.
• There are approximately 30,000-40,000 vampires in the world. Their numbers grow much more slowly than humans because vampires don’t turn humans very often.
• Vampires are largely solitary. Sometimes a vampire will operate in a group with their fledglings and/or begetter, but the group is typically small. They have strong territorial instincts so working together in large numbers is generally quite difficult.
• Government and law enforcement organizations, such as the army and police, don’t get involved with vampires, on a principle of “mutually assured destruction”. Vampires are greatly outnumbered by humanity but are quick, strong, sneaky, and difficult to kill. They can easily mind control humans who would stand against them in large numbers so government organizations simply avoid standing against them to maintain a sense of integrity. In return, vampires generally don’t get involved with government organizations themselves because it’s just not worth the effort and potential consequences.
• Vampires are usually regarded as dead by human legal systems. They are afforded no protection by the law, but not actively persecuted.
• While still generally the prevailing notion going back centuries, the non-interventionist stance of governments towards vampires was solidified by the failure of the CIA’s MKULTRA program in the United States in the mid-20th century. The CIA attempted to recruit vampires and utilize their powers to combat and match supposed Eastern Bloc brainwashing techniques, and this went predictably poorly, so the CIA resorted to plan B of dosing people with LSD.
• Amateur vampire hunters are the main threat to vampires, as a result of this. Such people gather in small communities themselves and seek out and kill individual vampires. Very few vampire hunters amass more than two or three vampire kills in their careers, due to retirement, traumatic experiences, enthrallment, or death.
• Humans have a somewhat poor understanding of vampires’ biology, powers and weaknesses. One major example is that it’s generally assumed that vampires can only be killed by being stabbed through the heart with a wooden stake, when in reality any kind of sturdy, sharp implement can do the job. Additionally, Christian paraphernalia such as crucifixes and more rarely other religious symbols are sometimes believed to harm or ward off vampires, but this is not the case.
• Vampires themselves often internalize the cultural idea that they have to sleep in their own coffins for one reason or another. However, they can sleep in normal beds just fine, as long as the surroundings are sufficiently dark and shielded from hazards like sunlight.
• Since vampires are not affected by religious paraphernalia, the world does not necessarily operate on Christian logic. However, many vampires expect it to, at least in some ways, due to cultural tradition, usually seeing themselves as opposed to God or other powers symbolic of goodness and morality. Vampires often regard themselves as soulless, inherently evil beings, but it is not any more clear-cut if souls even truly exist as such than it is in the real world.
• Similarly, vampires are frequently regarded by themselves and the general public as “undead”. However, it is highly debatable if there is a meaningful distinction between undeath and life.
• Due to their rarity and separation from human society, scientific knowledge surrounding vampires and other supernatural beings is limited. There are, however, people who dedicate their lives to studying them; they comprise a well-recognized if dubiously rigorous academic field known as “paranormal studies”.
• The novel Dracula exists and is a work of fiction much as it is in our world. Like in our world, Dracula, its title character, and its adaptations heavily inform the cultural perception of vampires, but they contain many inaccuracies to how real-world vampires work, likely due to author Bram Stoker’s ignorance or artistic license.

Lilith

• Lilith is the mythical ancestor of all vampires.
• Nobody is completely sure if she was real or not, but it’s usually thought that vampires must have come from a single common ancestor, because it can’t be turtles all the way down.
• Those who believe in Lilith believe that she is either dead (possibly living on in the afterlife) or in hiding. Various accounts of her death exist but they are contrary and dubious. For example, in some depictions, Jesus personally killed her and became the first vampire hunter.
• In any case, Lilith has not been verifiably seen by any vampire within their lifetime — not for thousands of years.
• Lilith is often thought of as one and the same with the Abrahamic mythological figure of the same name, Adam’s first wife who refused to obey him. At the very least, she is always identified as having lived among prehistoric humanity since a very small few vampires have been alive long enough to remember this period.
• She is sometimes instead depicted as a cult priestess who performed blood sacrifices, or the first adulterer, or something similar. She is always regarded as having engaged in acts that humanity typically considers deviant and sinful.
• In any case, she is thought to have either struck a deal with dark powers, Satan or otherwise, or to have been cursed for her sinful nature, resulting in her becoming the first vampire. Alternatively she may be regarded as having been a demonic entity in her own right and the foremost demonic entity to exist, with no Satan figure as her superior.
• She is sometimes thought of as having powers greater than those of her descendants.
• Vampires who believe in her in a fully religious sense usually worship her as a true goddess, beyond any other object of devotion they may have, and as a patron of vampires who lives on in at least some spiritual sense.
• Whether they regard her in a fully religious sense or not, many vampires look to Lilith as a source of guidance and inspiration in their own undeath, especially if they are left without their begetter. Many thralls and fledglings are similarly made to believe in and worship Lilith, helping perpetuate oral tradition surrounding her.
• She laid with and corrupted women at least as much as she did men, turning many of them into sinful creatures like herself.
• She is usually regarded as having been completely hedonistic and bloodthirsty, valuing blood, sex, and pleasure over anything else, and having disregarded concerns of morality.

Other Supernatural Beings

• There are also other supernatural beings in the world. There are no current plans to focus stories on these beings, so there’s not a lot defined about how they work.
• Werewolves are the only other supernatural being that is specifically confirmed to exist, but there are likely others. Other beings are likely to be characteristic of a similar supernatural atmosphere to vampires, such as ghosts and fairies.
• Werewolves occupy a similar place in the world to vampires, being broadly known and feared by human society (when appropriate), but they operate in the shadows and have little public presence.

Vampire Biology

• Vampires mostly resemble humans physically. However, they have pallid skin resembling that of a corpse, fangs, and bright red eyes.
• A vampire’s fangs are sensitive to the touch, bordering on an erogenous zone.
• Vampires are immortal. They will never age or die unless killed. They can still grow hair and fingernails and change their bodies with HRT and similar substances, but these take about ten times longer than they would for a human.
• Vampires need blood, and it’s the only thing they can gain sustenance from.
• Specifically, they need to drink the fresh (or preserved) blood of humans. Dried blood, the blood of corpses, and animal blood both taste bad and provide no sustenance.
• They require roughly 500 milliliters of blood a night to survive. However, vampires have an appetite for much more than this.
• Without blood, a vampire’s skin will dry out, the red of their eyes will dull and darken, and they will become weaker and more sluggish gradually until they are indistinguishable from a corpse, at which point they die. This takes about a week or two.
• Vampires have incredible bloodlust and cannot help themselves from attacking humans whose blood appeals to them without active mental discipline. This is greatly amplified if the vampire is starving, and especially prominent in fledglings.
• A vampire drinking a human’s blood is a highly sexual experience for both the vampire and the victim, and a vampire’s desire to drink from a person is highly correlated with and virtually indistinguishable from romantic and sexual attraction.
• While vampires do receive pleasure from conventional, genital-based sex, the sensation of an orgasm is muted for them and they can only be fully sexually satisfied by the taste of blood and the feeling of their fangs inside a human.
• A human being bitten by a vampire does feel the pain of the vampire’s fangs piercing their skin and the uncomfortable sensation of blood being removed from their body, but it simultaneously overwhelmingly stimulates the human’s pleasure response.
• Vampires are capable of eating and digesting human food and drink, but it doesn’t taste good or provide them with any sustenance.
• Vampires have no other physiological needs besides blood, not even air, though breathing is necessary to speak and vampires often do so to calm themselves as an emotional response. However, when not speaking and especially while sleeping or suffering from stress, they often appear uncannily still and can be difficult to distinguish from corpses.
• Vampire saliva has healing properties, allowing them to close their victims’ bite wounds quickly and easily, though a mark similar to a hickey with two prick marks from the vampire’s fangs is left visible for roughly a week.
• Vampire saliva also stimulates blood regeneration in the bitten human, to the point that thralls can safely provide 500ml of blood to their enthraller around once per week.
• The mark left by a vampire bite becomes a temporary erogenous zone for the bitten human, for as long as the mark lasts. The mark’s sensitivity diminishes over that time.
• On a diet of only blood, vampires have almost no physical excretions besides saliva and tears; they don’t sweat or produce waste. However, if they consume human food or drink, they must pass it as a human would, which is usually an uncomfortable and unfamiliar experience.
• Vampires aren’t afflicted by human diseases, and they don’t act as carriers for them.
• They retain disabilities from their human lives.
• Vampires emit no body heat and their skin and breath usually feels very cold to humans as a result, but their charisma makes up for the likely unpleasantness of this. They also prefer much colder temperatures than humans, usually around 10°C/50°F, and they feel uncomfortably hot at temperatures of around 20°C/68°F or above.
• The warmth of a human body and similarly shaped objects, such as a warm pillow or plushie, is comforting to a vampire, unlike ambient temperature.
• Vampires need to sleep much like humans; however, they are nocturnal. Nocturnality is both a natural urge and an essentially necessary readjustment due to the threat posed by sunlight.
• Vampires are prone to making “inhuman” sounds such as growls and hisses, especially when they are excited or agitated.
• When a vampire dies, they simply become a corpse the same as a human would; they don’t turn to dust or the like, though prolonged exposure to sunlight can burn their bodies to ash while they’re dying. Once fully dead, a corpse no longer exhibits vampiric properties; it is not burned by sunlight and can appear in photographs, for example.
• Vampires can’t be seen in reflections, photographs, or video. They also can’t be heard over analog phone lines, but digital phone lines function normally for them.
• Clothing worn by vampires is also not visible in reflections, photographs, or video.
• Vampires’ blood vessels are filled with a viscous, dark liquid that is variably known as ichor or miasma. Vampires have less of this than humans have blood and their bodies are somewhat lighter than humans’ bodies as a result. It’s not appetizing or nourishing to either humans or vampires, though it has a somewhat similar chemical makeup to human blood.
• Vampires’ hearts do not beat, and their ichor does not flow, but it is stable and present through the body.
• With enough exposure, a taste for it can be acquired to some extent.
• Vampires are infertile. Nobody is ever born as a vampire; all vampires were once human.

Vampire Powers

• They are superhumanly strong. This is not fully tied to musculature, though more muscular vampires are stronger than and can physically overpower less muscular ones. Any vampire, however, can easily overpower a human, lift heavy objects with relatively little effort, and damage hard materials like stone or metal with their bare hands, even if they’re skinny, due to supernatural elements.
• They are superhumanly fast, able to move almost in the blink of an eye from a human’s perspective. This is most effective over short distances rather than something like long distance running. It’s largely reflexes and quickness, rather than endurance running.
• They regenerate from injuries very quickly, especially when injured by something other than silver, sunlight, or injuries to the heart. A knife wound through a vampire’s shoulder might already be closed by the time the attacker finishes slashing through their chest. They can also reattach limbs if they are cut off.
• When injured by silver or sunlight, a vampire still heals substantially faster than a human would, but it can take a week or two for the injury to recover depending on how serious it is.
• Vampires’ consciousness doesn’t rely solely on their brains due to supernatural elements, so blows to the head are not particularly deadly as they are to humans. However, injuries to the brain can still temporarily impair a vampire’s senses, greatly disorienting them.
• Vampires have greatly increased pain tolerance for anything other than their weaknesses as well. This is part of what makes their weaknesses especially debilitating, because vampires are not typically used to feeling intense pain.
• They don’t suffer from minor aches and pains, such as carpal tunnel or back pain.
• They can see in complete darkness perfectly well, as well as a human can in a well lit room if not considerably better. However, they have trouble seeing in bright light, which can temporarily blind them if it’s bright enough.
• They have an extremely strong sense of smell and taste tuned towards human blood specifically, though this also has other side effects (see weakness to garlic). A vampire can recognize and track a human just from the lingering scent of their blood, especially if they’ve tasted it before.
• Vampires experience the taste of humans’ blood as reflective of their personalities. This is highly subjective and not related to the physical makeup of the human’s blood. However, vampires can also taste the physical makeup of a human’s blood, on top of this — for example, they can determine blood type, nutrient, and hormone levels in blood by smell and taste, though recognizing specific blood types and ingredients requires experience and knowledge.
• Vampires also have sharpened senses in general to a lesser extent. They can hear humans’ heartbeats from across a room and sense a moving bullet prior to impact (if not fast enough to actually dodge the bullet).
• They have an innate, supernatural, hypnotic charisma about them that affects every way in which humans can perceive them — their appearance, their voice, even the way their skin feels is supernaturally appealing to humans and causes them to tend toward feeling sleepy and submissive around the vampire, as well as being especially turned on and easily flustered. Vampires can consciously increase and/or decrease this effect, especially in their voice, with practice.
• They can put humans into a hypnotic trance by looking them directly in the eyes. This effect is nearly immediate and irresistible to a human, lulling a human into trance after just a brief moment of incidental direct eye contact, especially when aided by the vampire’s charisma. Even short glances can lead to trance when combined with charisma.
• There are techniques of dubious efficacy that are able to improve human resistance to this effect. However, even the best can't stay conscious staring at a vampire’s eyes for more than around 10 seconds.
• A vampire’s strength, speed, regeneration, and charisma all wane if they are lacking blood, though they still partially manifest. At no time do vampires ever have difficulty controlling their thralls/fledglings, if they are already enthralled/turned.

Enthrallment

• Once a human is bitten by a vampire, the human becomes the vampire’s thrall. This effect is permanent and can’t be externally undone by any means, although enthrallment can potentially be overcome if the human thrall spends a long time away from the vampire (such as if the vampire dies).
• Via hypnosis, it’s at least somewhat possible for a vampire to reverse enthrallment in their own thralls. It’s a complicated process that requires a lot of effort and intention. This is not commonly understood as possible, and most vampires wouldn’t pursue it anyway.
• When a human is bitten by a vampire for the first time, they enter a catatonic state for approximately 30-60 minutes while enthrallment takes hold.
• A thrall is completely obedient, submissive, and loyal to the vampire who enthralled them.
• Becoming a thrall doesn’t fundamentally change a human’s personality. Rather, it makes them fall hopelessly in love with the vampire, causing them to focus their priorities on the vampire completely, even potentially at the expense of self-preservation. A thrall will gladly give their life for their enthraller if ordered to, or likely even without orders in emergency situations as the desire to protect runs strong. However, thralls are very much capable of independent thought and action, and they are the same people they were pre-enthrallment, with complete continuity of consciousness.
• Some vampires do alter their thralls’ personalities or strip them of identity via hypnosis, but this is not the default state.
• The only orders a thrall can disobey are generally those that would threaten their closest loved ones, though “threaten” must be understood in a very strict physical sense; a thrall will generally be completely supportive of their enthraller enthralling their loved one and may aid with the process. Disobedience when a loved one is threatened is still extremely difficult and will likely lead to guilt, regret, and other emotional strain for a thrall, because their enthraller is also a loved one, perhaps more loved than any other. However, an order or attitude from a thrall’s enthraller that causes significant enough strain can very rarely allow the thrall to move against their enthraller’s interests in a broader sense.
• Thralls can usually recognize that their love and devotion for their enthraller has been forced upon them through enthrallment, especially if they have a prior understanding of the concept, but this doesn’t lessen enthrallment’s effect at all. Instead, enthrallment is viewed by the thrall as a beneficial effect or sometimes destiny.
• A thrall is often inclined to regard their enthraller with religious devotion, viewing them as a divine being or manifestation of divinity. This is at the very least easy to spur on by a vampire who so desires.
• Psychologically traumatic situations and former enthrallment both provide resistance to enthrallment and the effects of charisma, but nothing resembling full immunity. However, with enough time and distance, a thrall or fledgling can completely disavow their enthraller or begetter.
• Due to their territoriality, most vampires are unwilling to share the blood of their thralls with other vampires, and it’s instinctually perceived as a bad idea for a vampire to pursue a thrall of another vampire without the enthraller’s permission.
• A thrall’s blood smells and tastes different to a vampire, corresponding to their enthraller. This allows a vampire to tell if a human is enthralled, and potentially by whom if there’s something to compare against. As a result, enthralling an already-enthralled human doesn’t generally happen by accident.
• Under certain extremely rare and difficult to replicate circumstances, it’s possible for a thrall to be accidentally granted a longer lifespan by their enthraller, which persists after the enthraller’s death. Vampires and humans alike are unaware of exactly why or how this happens, and it’s mostly unknown and frequently doubted to be a real phenomenon. Hypotheses involve rare neurological differences or the influence of the vampire’s biology upon the human.

Turning Humans

• Vampires can turn humans into vampires by drinking every last drop of blood in their bodies. This is referred to as “turning”.
• A human appears to die (and by some interpretations, does die) when drained of blood in this way, and remain apparently dead for approximately 72 hours before resurrecting as a vampire, always during nighttime.
• Since the process requires every single drop of blood being taken, it is somewhat unreliable, even when performed by an experienced vampire. However, it’s difficult to determine if the process was performed correctly until the person either resurrects as a vampire or enough time passes that the person can be safely regarded as dead.
• If the body does not remain fully intact, the person will not be able to resurrect as a vampire. It is considered especially important to leave the body undisturbed to the maximum extent possible.
• The body does show signs of vampirism, such as reddening of eyes and growing of fangs, during the three-day process, but it is rarely that noticeable until the vampire is imminently about to resurrect.
• Vampires can’t be turned back into humans.
• A fledgling is a person who has recently been turned into a vampire. It is also used more broadly to refer to all of the vampires whom another vampire has turned, regardless of how long they’ve been vampires (“their fledglings”).
• “Recent” in this context can refer to a period as long as a few decades, referring to perceived immaturity more than a specific amount of time.
• The vampire who turned a fledgling is known as their begetter.
• A fledgling is obedient to their begetter, much like a thrall, but the effect is even more powerful. It’s more than loyalty, it’s a compulsion to obey commands beyond wants and desires, a feeling of being “forced”. It can still be resisted indirectly if enough stress is present in the relationship.
• A fledgling perceives memories of their human life as somewhat distant, and their body as alien and “not theirs”. However, there is largely a continuity of consciousness.
• Fledglings experience more overwhelming bloodlust than other vampires due to a lack of discipline, and having never tasted blood before. A fledgling’s first drink is often especially dangerous and difficult to rein in even for a very careful and/or controlling begetter.
• Culturally, a fledgling’s begetter is generally expected to act as a mentor, teaching them to manage their bloodlust.
• Fledglings can be released from their begetter’s control permanently via a command, granting them the full extent of their free will back. This cannot be undone once it is done.
• Culturally, some vampires believe that this is the correct course of action in the long term according to Lilith’s teachings. Other vampires keep control of their fledglings for their entire undeaths, but this is less common.

Vampire Weaknesses and Limitations

• Vampires are burned by contact with silver, and injuries from silver implements take longer to heal than other injuries.
• Vampires are burned especially badly by direct or reflected sunlight, and prolonged exposure can easily kill them by melting their flesh and reducing their body to ash. While vampires dislike bright light and hot temperatures, only sunlight actually burns them; other sources of heat and light simply cause discomfort and light can impede vision.
• Moonlight doesn’t harm vampires, and along with starlight, it is not perceived by most vampires as being problematically bright.
• Ultraviolet light produced by sources other than the sun doesn’t harm vampires.
• A vampire is killed if their heart is pierced by a sharp and sturdy object.
• Wooden stakes work and are often believed to be the only appropriate or functional weapon by humans, but any sharp, sturdy weapon will actually work, including swords, knives, and bullets (though bullets are difficult to aim directly at the heart).
• Vampires’ bones are more fragile than humans’ bones. While this is usually made up for by their ability to regenerate from injuries, this includes their ribs, which accentuates their hearts’ vulnerability.
• While not a weakness unique to vampires, vampires can also be killed if their entire body is obliterated. They cannot survive being submerged in lava or the force of a massive explosion, for example.
• Loss of the head is usually deadly, as it prevents a vampire from consuming blood and takes a very long time to regenerate, leading the vampire to die of starvation.
• Vampires cannot willfully cross running water.
• Bridges, boats, and planes are all examples of ways that a vampire can bypass this limitation.
• This is not a physical limitation, but a mental one. It essentially functions as a sort of hyper-OCD that prevents vampires from being able to psych themselves up to cross the water under any circumstances, even if not doing so would cause harm to themselves or others.
• A vampire must be invited into a residence by one of its residents before the vampire can willfully enter it. However, they only need to be invited into a particular residence once, and such invitations cannot be rescinded as long as the current resident remains resident there.
• A person must personally live in a residence and consider it their home for them to be considered a resident by a vampire. Landlords are not residents and have no power over residences they own according to property law.
• Vampires have an instinctive sense for what areas comprise a residence, and they can identify residents of the residence.
• A residence is always a defined, consistent physical area, and residences can be nested inside of other residences — for example, a person’s bedroom in an apartment that they share with roommates would likely be their residence but not their roommates’ residence, while the apartment as a whole would be a residence shared between all the roommates.
• Invitations extracted via hypnosis or enthrallment of a resident do count.
• Vampires themselves are residents of their own residences, and they must invite other vampires into their residences before those vampires can enter. A vampire can always enter a residence that is their own.
• A resident physically forcing a vampire into a residence is usually regarded as an implicit invitation.
• A person physically forcing a vampire into a residence that is not the person’s own will result in the vampire attempting to leave the residence as quickly as possible, or feeling extremely uncomfortable and paranoid if they are not able to do so.
• Like running water, this limitation is governed by a sort of hyper-OCD that cannot be bypassed by a vampire through mental discipline.
• Vampires find the smell of garlic overwhelming and unpleasant. Though it does not cause injury, it can serve as a repellant since vampires will often search elsewhere for blood if they have the option when subjected to the smell of garlic.