And now for a turn to the darker side of things! I have been a World of Darkness fan since 1996 or so, and can’t believe it took me this long to make a WoD character! The Sabbat has consistently been my favorite sect of vampires, even as my favorite clan has shifted and changed over the years. In its origins, my love of the Sword of the Caine comes from my experience as a very alienated genderqueer child. The idea of not being human felt very affirming to me, and in my time following the fandom that the sect attracted, I became very aware of the problems with 90s edgelord politics. Saw some things I didn’t like in my own head as I did, too, and thankfully was able to change those things once I saw them. Anyway, I hope you enjoy Warm Body of the Bedbugs, the last Sabbat pack left in Atlanta, Georgia.
Haylee was an addict, plain and simple. Some might have assumed that her addiction was to the anesthesia the surgeons gave her before they cut into her flesh, or the opiates she was given afterwards to deal with the pain of healing. Those people would be wrong. Haylee was addicted to both change and perfection.
At times, she wondered if she could be considered a 20th-century Knight of the Round Table, whose Grail wasn’t some moralizing cup but the supreme sexiness of a tailor-made body. Or maybe she was a transhumanist of the sort that was so popular amongst people smarter than she was, rising above the mere limitations of flawed flesh. Mostly, she just didn’t think about it, though. Plastic surgery was fun, and that was all she really cared to know. The joy of looking in the mirror and seeing a new self looking back at her, the exercise of control that came with molding her very physical reality ~ there was nothing like it, if she were being honest.
Haylee had the luck or unluck (depending on your point of view) to be a patron of Northside Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. The weather was warming in early June, as the Sabbat was preparing to kick off their Firedance, and the Blood Bubbles pack had just arrived in the city. Its ductus, a Tzimisce by the name of Cactus-Drinker, had determined that they needed a few more members to throw away against the Camarilla forces. Shovelheads, expendable little time-bombs of childer, in other words.
The Blood Bubbles descended upon Northside Hospital, slaughtering doctors and patients alike and pinning them up to the walls in a wide variety of demeaning, degrading, silly, and horrifying poses. They were all the worse for their diversity, and the blood made the floors shine so much more brilliantly than the linoleum had. Amidst all this terror, a neat pile of blood bags was stacked with a simple nurse-station Post-It stuck on them, reading only “You actually drink this shit?”
Haylee was laid up in a bed at the time, recovering from yet another modification, yet another installation. To this day, she doesn’t know why Cactus-Drinker used one of his skin-needles to slice off Bugboy’s ear while Bugboy was fang-deep in her neck. But it did do that, and Bugboy’s blood mingled with hers and she leapt out of her hospital bed giggling the way only opiate dregs can make you giggle. In the next few weeks, she tore her way through the corpses of the Ivory Tower, unknowing and uncaring of why or what the repercussions would be.
Shortly after the Siege of Atlanta was complete, the Blood Bubbles planned to join the wave of Cainites headed north to push the Firedance against more and more Camarilla cities. Warm Body found herself reticent to leave the city where once she had been human and loved to wash down Big Macs with deep paper cups of Coca-Cola. Maybe she wasn’t as inhuman as she thought she was, as the Sword of Caine wanted her to be. Not yet, anyway.
Ironically, it was the very place where she died that gave her succor in that confusing time. She was finally interred on a refrigerated shelf in the Northside Hospital morgue. Three days exactly she lay there, trying to remember what it was to shiver, before an assistant mortician got curious. His blood boiled her icy throat, and it felt so good inside her as she stumbled out of the hospital loading bay in search of a new fate.
She found the pack that called themselves the Bedbugs.
A decade later, the Second Inquisition and the Gehenna Crusade conspired to drain Atlanta of its Cainites. Empty nighttime streets were safe for approximately one week before a new set of monsters moved in, calling themselves Camarilla and anarchs. The Bedbugs decorated their haven with the bodies of any Sabbat who dared insist that they join this self-destructive Crusade, each of them carved with the words “Did the Tower’s Work For Them”. This tells you how much the Bedbugs had to say about what those Cainites came to tell them, so you shouldn’t be surprised that the pack didn’t realize they were the last ones left until sometime in 2012.
Quickly doing the math, the Bedbugs realized they couldn’t survive on their own. The Camarilla and the anarchs each outnumbered them a few times over, so they made the decision to reveal themselves to the binary power structure of the city. “You cannot exterminate us,” they said to the vampires of both groups. “We live in the mess you each made of this world and we are tenacious beyond your ability to know. What is within your ability to know is this hard truth: you are as we are. There is no need for us to exist in war, our siblings under Caine, and hiding from each other is distasteful. We mean you no harm, for you and we are equal, and fighting for each other’s blood is a distraction from the feast this city represents.”
The Bedbugs thus bought themselves some amount of peace in Atlanta as the last dregs of its occupiers, and Warm Body was among them as they did so. In truth, she was the mastermind behind this plan, the only Bedbug lacking in Obfuscate or much desire for stealth. She likes the attention too much.
In truth, the pack relies upon Warm Body for her ability to get both the living and the undead to do what she ~ they ~ wants them to do. She is their face, in Elysium, among the prey, and wherever the anarchs gather. It helps that she is damnably hard to kill or even wound.
Nonetheless, she is not the pack priest. Sure, she could probably easily become such, if she wanted, but she doesn’t want. More than a lack of will, she lacks the desire to be in charge. It’s so much easier and more fun to follow the group’s whims, only pitching into decision-making when she actually has an idea worth mentioning. No, she’s quite happy letting the Nosferatu No-Tell hold the priesthood.
She understands her Gangrel packmate Itchy. He may have gotten his money and power as a mortal despite his addiction, while she gained it from hers, but still their personalities were shaped by very similar forces. Need, being the name of that force. Warm Body needed to change, Itchy needed oblivion; Haylee sought perfection, Paul sought to de-stress.
No, it’s Dr. Gibran with whom she butts heads most often. In truth, these conflicts are merely the last spasms of dying habits, and she knows it. Everyone in her position has found themself having to push against a doctor’s ideas of what is rational or possible, has had to push these medical layabouts to actually innovate and serve. Merely the fact that he still uses the title awakens these last inescapable mortal habits in her, and she hates him for reminding her that her breathing days are not so long ago and not so overcome as she would like. One day soon, vinculum willing, she will remove the irritant from her world.
Since the Bedbugs announced themselves to the local power structures, Warm Body has found herself swirled into the Atlanta arts scene in a way she hadn’t been before, the darling of Toreadors both Kindred and lick alike. The Toreador who calls herself Adélaïde Sault has particularly taken an interest in Haylee, the political outsider. Certainly, the Camarilla elder must think Warm Body useful for some political scheme or a dozen, but she has also proved useful to Haylee in turn. The two have built a relationship that may lack in trust but abounds in mutual aid.
Warm Body has found herself caught up with a couple of mortals. One is an author by the name of Kenneth Alves (they/them), who writes cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and transhumanist science fiction, imagining sprawling futures where anyone can be perfect in any way they wish, at the mere cost of a few dollars and a couple of hours. Their works have revived something in Warm Body, something she dearly hopes can be incorporated into the vampiric experience ~ hope ~ and so has come under her protection. Giovanna Roach, on the other hand . . . well that relationship is built on mutual confirmation of cosmology. Giovanna is a sculptress in any medium that allows her to lay her hands upon the sculpture and possesses a wicked ability to scavenge herself those media for her to sculpt. She thinks Warm Body loves her, and there might be some strange way in which that’s true, but Haylee mostly finds comfort against the cold nights in listening to Giovanna talk about her artistic process. It might be the Blood Bond that makes the sculptress think that.
People so well-tuned into aesthetic ecstasy as the arts community is are ridiculously easy to seduce, and Warm Body has found that she enjoys making her body warmer by making theirs just that little bit less. It’s the path of least resistance, if we’re being honest, and serves to not distract her from her goals. They seem to have some sort of vinculum of their own, however. Haylee is always shocked when she remembers the powerful bonding sex and love have for the living; she hasn’t been dead all that long, not nearly long enough to think of such things as “the mortals’ strange form of vinculum”, right? Nonetheless, Kenneth resents what they see as Warm Body stealing their boyfriend, one Jasper Boyd, Jr., from them. In truth, Haylee hasn’t fucked Jasper in well over half a year, but jealousy dies hard.
Don’t think Warm Body is a fool, however ~ she knows Kenneth wishes her ill. She just hasn’t yet had the courage to do something about it yet. Her addiction was ever about indulgence and pleasure, and not about the self-harm to be found in others’ scalpels.
Name: Haylee “Warm Body” Maddok // Concept: Bimbo Plastic Surgery Addict // Clan: Salubri
Sire: Bugboy (of the nomad Blood Bubbles pack) // Grandsire: Kervos (of the Talons pack of Montreal)
Greatgrandsire: Thomas the Angry // Age: 1999 CE (neonate)
Ambition: // Predator Type: Siren // Generation: 13th // Path: Cathari
Conviction (Touchstone): Perfection for the people, gatekeepers be damned! (Kenneth Alves)
Conviction (Touchstone): How can control be real, if you can’t see it, touch it? (Giovanna Roach, sculptress in multiple media)
Strength 🩸🩸 // Charisma 🩸🩸🩸 // Intelligence 🩸
Dexterity 🩸🩸🩸 // Manipulation 🩸🩸🩸🩸 // Wits 🩸🩸
Stamina 🩸🩸🩸 // Composure 🩸🩸 // Resolve 🩸🩸
Health 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 🩸🩸🩸 // Willpower 🩸🩸🩸🩸
Athletics 🩸 // Animal Ken // Academics
Brawl // Etiquette 🩸🩸 // Awareness
Craft // Insight 🩸🩸🩸 // Finance
Drive 🩸 // Intimidation // Investigation
Firearms // Leadership // Medicine 🩸🩸 Cosmetic Surgeries
Larceny // Performance 🩸🩸 Stripping // Occult
Melee // Persuasion 🩸🩸🩸 // Politics
Stealth // Streetwise 🩸 // Science
Survival // Subterfuge 🩸🩸🩸🩸 Seduction // Technology
Feeding: Charisma+Subterfuge 🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲 🎲🎲🎲
Auspex 🩸🩸 Heightened Senses, Obeah
Dominate 🩸 Compel
Fortitude 🩸🩸🩸 Resilience, Toughness, Defy Bane
Beautiful 🩸🩸
Eat Food 🩸🩸
Enemy 🩸
Mawla 🩸🩸🩸
Retainers 🩸🩸
Suspect 🩸 Anarchs
Suspect 🩸 Camarilla
No comments:
Post a Comment