I made some progress on Carpos’ Chapters 2 and 4. Also did some preparatory work for a new If Arc story. I’ve got to gather up some new teasers and get them up in the near future. Stay tuned.

I managed to creep forward a little further on Carpos’ Chapter 2, but then started wandering around through other sections tweaking chapters I’d already written there. The really interesting part was my work on Carpos’ epilogue. I’ve pretty well finished it, but the character kinda took over as I was writing. He managed to completely subvert my original intention. I guess he really didn’t like the ending I had planned for him. I’ll detail more of what happened in a few months once his section has been published. I think I may stick with TTWC3 through the rest of the week, seeing as how I’m making progress. I can pick up JJ next week. Stay tuned.

I made a little progress on Carpos’ Chapters 2 and 3. I’ve still got a ways to go before I can switch over, but maybe a day’s solid effort can get me where I need to be. Stay tuned.

I did a little writing on Carpos’ epilogue of TTWC3. Not much, just a couple hundred words so I wouldn’t have to have absolutely no progress for three days straight. I did say I had a lot of homework, after all, and there other things vying for my time as well. I think I’ll spend another day or two to finish Carpos’ Chapter 2 and then switch over to JJ. Stay tuned.

Given the theme of this week’s movie reviews, I thought it might be nice to go into detail on the rules for vampirism in my stories. At present, vampirism only exists in my Tellus Arc stories. I suppose in a roundabout way it crops up in a few Earth Arc stories and could potentially present itself in the Cross and If Arcs as well, but for now, it’s restricted to the Tellus Arc, hence the title of the post.

I’ve already depicted the process of turning into a vampire twice: with Flavia Sapphira in The Three Warriors and with Narkissos (better known as Sir Caligo) in TTWC2, so let’s start there. First off, to become a vampire, you must drink the blood of a vampire. Typically, you are first drained of blood to just shy of the point of death as the admixture of essences eases the transition. The process of being reborn into unlife is very traumatic and it takes great force of will to maintain your mind. Should you fail, you’ll becomes a ghoul, a mere ravening beast. Ghouls have all the powers of a vampire, but they don’t tend to live very long because they have nothing more than animal instinct to guide them. Hunting them is comparatively easy.

The powers of a newly born vampire are relative to its sire. In other words, should you be turned by an ancient vampire, you would start out much stronger than if you were sired by a younger vampire. There is also the matter of your innate abilities. A turned archmage will have even stronger magical powers, though someone like a white mage would have their alignment flipped, but more on that later. The basic abilities include increased strength and speed and heightened senses. Other abilities such as flight and shapeshifting manifest later. Lestat’s comment from Interview with a Vampire holds true. “The Dark Gift is different for each of us.” Different abilities will manifest for different individuals. For instance, if you are a latent telepath, that ability would manifest itself after you were turned. Even the slightest latent potential will be drawn out in the due course of time. As your vampiric powers grow, all your abilities, both natural and supernatural, are amplified and enhanced.

As for weaknesses, light is the great vampire killer. Sunlight is the most obvious, but light magic is also effective. Even for a newborn vampire, exposure is not immediately fatal, but the resistance depends of the power of the individual vampire. Vampires are also vulnerable to water, the purer the better (hence the effectiveness of holy water). The same applies to silver. For wood, it must be fresh, no more than a day or two since it was cut, ergo a makeshift stake broken off from a piece of antique furniture wouldn’t do you much good. Garlic and certain pungent herbs can have a warding effect on weaker vampires but will not stop a determined one. As for the effectiveness of holy objects such as crucifixes, it is the person’s faith rather than the object itself that has the warding power. (As a result, a committed atheist can’t expect to hold up a cross to save himself.) The vampire’s heart is the source of his powers. Using a wooden stake blocks the flow of energies that sustain the vampire, but this isn’t enough to kill it. If you remove the stake, the vampire will reanimate. Cutting out the heart is more effective, but if the heart is reunited with the body (or even the ashes of the body), the vampire can be restored. To completely and permanently destroy a vampire, you must stake the heart, sever the head, then burn it all in the light of the sun. However, less thorough measures are normally sufficient as the average vampire isn’t going to have anyone working to restore him.

The vampire’s thirst for blood is the basic means by which he gains and sustains power. The longer a vampire goes without drinking, the weaker he becomes and the more susceptible to a vampire’s vulnerabilities. It is also important that the blood be fresh or else the life energies will dissipate, which happens quickly as the blood is separated from the body or the body approaches death. (As a result, the modern vampire drinking from blood packets wouldn’t be viable under this system.) The more potent the blood, the more power is derived from it. The blood of the young has more vigor than that of the old, the blood of a mage more than that of a commoner, and so on and so forth. All else being equal, a vampire who feeds on humans is going to be stronger than one who feeds on rats. It is possible to slow the atrophy by entering into a state of hibernation and there is also something of a rubber band effect where an atrophied vampire can regain power faster than it was first acquired. Beside basic life energies, abilities and experiences can be transmitted via the blood. We saw this in KoG3 with Adrienne picking up Byrnan by drinking Mark’s blood and in TTWC2 where Caligo was able to completely read Sir Telemachos’ mind via his blood. As a result, the drinking of blood is more than just a matter of acquiring energy and makes active vampires all the more dangerous.

Dhampirs, or half-vampires, are an interesting case. They are as varied as full-blooded vampires in terms of their abilities and vulnerabilities. It’s an oversimplification to describe them as having half the power and half the weakness, but it provides a conceptual starting point. The more blood a dhampir drinks, the more their vampiric side comes to the fore, but only by drinking vampire blood can they be fully turned. Only some ancient vampires have the ability to breed, so typically the only way a dhampir can be born is if the human mother is turned while pregnant, as was the case with Flavia Sapphira. Unsurprisingly, dhampirs are exceedingly rare. The Cadmus twins shouldn’t be seen as typical examples of dhampirs because of Shadowblight’s extensive experimentation on them. Vincentian had a natural affinity for regeneration, so this was amplified to the point where he could regenerate more quickly and completely than even many full vampires. Adrienne pushed the physical limitations of a dhampir’s body without a significant increase in vulnerability, but she lacked any higher level abilities like shapeshifting and suffered a thirst for blood nearly on par with a a full vampire. Before Shadowblight’s experimentation, they both had a higher thirst for blood as a product of habit because their mother raised them as full vampires.

Lastly, we’ll discuss psychic vampires. These aren’t necessarily vampires in the traditional sense, though it’s possible for a conventional vampire with psychic abilities to become a psychic vampire. Basically, a psychic vampire feeds on the astral energies of others as opposed to blood. This could kill the mind just as extensive exsanguination can kill the body. For dual vampires, there are two options for gaining power. A dual vampire could hibernate with his physical body while continuing to feed psychically and awaken even stronger.

When I had a friend read T3W, he noted the peculiarity of Flavia Sapphira being able to see herself in the mirror after she was turned, as opposed to the common trope of vampires casting no reflection. At first I considered going back to change it but decided instead to leave it in. My post facto reasoning is that only vampires of a certain power level cease to have reflections.

Well, hopefully this has served to be an illuminating post (apologies to the vampires for whom illumination isn’t a desired state of affairs). Perhaps I’ll make another similar post on werewolves later in the month. Stay tuned.

I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but I found myself working on BroPen yesterday, expanding the prologue and fiddling around with the other scattered bit’s I’ve already written. Once I finish TTWC3, it’ll be the Tellus Arc story I focus on and I’ll admit that I’ve been looking forward to it for some time. I’ve got a lot of homework to do this weekend, but I’m going to try to finish at least one of Carpos’ chapters in TTWC3. Stay tuned.

I managed to make up for missing a day with some good strides in Carpos’ Chapter 2 of TTWC3. Another day of like progress should be enough to wrap it up. Stay tuned.

Once again, I find myself taking a current events topic to make a commentary post about how society functions in the Earth Union. Marriage is a contentious issue, at least in my native country, to say the very least. (But then there’s scarcely a topic that isn’t fraught with bitter and irreconcilable differences in these troubled and sharply polarized times.) I’m going to begin with the disclaimer that I don’t consider this the ideal solution for the real world or even for the fictional world portrayed. This is simply the solution employed by the government of the Earth Union, for better or for worse.

One way the Earth Union chose to sidestep the controversy was by removing marriage as a legal construct. That isn’t to say there’s no marriage. It’s just not something the government chooses to define. That isn’t to say there’s no government involvement either. You see, the legal construct is domestic partnership and this has no real value judgment applied to it. Any two adult citizens can enter into a domestic partnership and for such matters as taxation, division of property, inheritance rights and visitation rights, it is more or less analogous to the legal trappings of marriage (at least in the American context). A domestic partnership need not involve any sexual relationship or even cohabitation. (Cohabitation at least is typically implied but not strictly necessary.) For instance, a single parent may choose to forge a domestic partnership with an adult child to extend insurance coverage. (You have a five-year grace period after reaching the age of majority [20] to remain under your parents’ insurance, but should a parent enter into a domestic partnership with an adult child, that insurance coverage could remain shared.) The conventional concept of marriage as a union between man and woman for the purpose of procreation does not need to be covered by a domestic partnership. Unless otherwise waived, biological parents have full rights to their offspring regardless of domestic partnership status. This would mean that technically polygamy is legal in the Union. You could, for instance, have a domestic partnership with your first wife and still maintain parental rights to your children by additional wives, but these additional wives wouldn’t enjoy the same legal protections as the wife who is also your legally sanctioned domestic partner. The most an additional wife could claim from you is child support. They would have no automatic rights of inheritance (though these could be secured by a legally binding will) or visitation in such instances as hospitalization (or the related authority on life-or-death decisions in the case of incapacitation unless granted by some additional contract). Officially, the Union discourages polygamy, but the government tends to turn a blind eye when it’s practiced.

Marriage as a religious or secular rite is entirely superfluous as far as the law is concerned in the strictest sense, so the government pretty well leaves it alone. Matters like age of consent and the like are a whole ‘nother can of worms and I don’t plan on getting into it here. However, as marriage doesn’t have the legal standing of a domestic partnership, you couldn’t get away with child marriage, at least not if the marriage is intended to be consummated. No matter the rite or ceremony, age of consent laws would still apply and marriage alone wouldn’t give legal sanction to a sexual relationship involving a minor.

You may find this an elegant solution for a one-world government to smoothe over the range of cultural differences across the world or you may see it as a corrupt and/or morally repugnant system prone to abuse. As I said in the initial disclaimer, I don’t necessarily consider it to be an ideal solution. It’s just the solution the Union opted to go with. I sometimes feel like I’m poking at a hornet’s nest bringing up hot-button issues like this, but maybe some of you will find it an interesting intellectual exercise. More to come, I’m sure.

For some reason, finishing Chapter 9 would’ve taken more brainpower than I had at the ready as late as it was when I started writing, so instead I finished Chapter 11 instead. This leaves me with gaps to fill for Chapters 6, 9 and 10, but these are all things I’ll work on the next time EM’s turn comes up. I’m going to switch over to TTWC3 and see how far I can get. Rounding out Carpos’ section would be nice, but I suppose I shouldn’t get too greedy. Stay tuned.

After spending a day playing Suikoden 3 instead of doing any writing, I managed to make a little progress on Chapter 9 of EM. I’m looking forward to writing my review of the game (still have a long ways to go, though). It’s quite the epic tale. Anyway, I’ll see if I can’t round out one more chapter of EM and then switch over to TTWC3. Stay tuned.