“What’s it like being so close to a vampire? Why does she look like a grandmother? Does she shapeshift?”

I get this and all manner of other questions about my elderly neighbor. And yes she definitely qualifies on that elderly label.

So let me give you a bit of a rundown on her as she gave it to be one of the first times we actually properly sat down and I wasn’t holding a death spell.

For starters, vampires can’t take over the world. They require too much in the way of resources to sustain that all the rest of the world would have to do is simply sit on their hands for a decade or two and all the vampires would die out.

Not that there’s that many to start with. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Perhaps the best way to think about vampires is as a kind of incomplete lich (which is tangent I’ll address in a moment). Vampires, as it was explained, are a relatively simple kind of undead sapient who retained their memories and control of themselves in the process of becoming undead. However, as a result of becoming unliving and due to the nature of naturally generated essentia relative to the energy requirements in sustaining an unliving indefinitely, vampires have to feed. And more specifically, they have to feed on sources of essentia.

Because blood is the common carrier of essentia and there’s a lot of folks with trace amounts who never actually demonstrate non-baseline talents, it’s ‘easy’ for a vampire to get by on these folks, albeit while drawing a lot of attention because of all of the people they have to attack to sustain themselves.

As a result, if a vampire gets hold of an undiscovered non-baseline wizard or torquay user, they tend to be very attached to them (since such a person can keep a vampire sustained or at least mostly fed, provided the vampire isn’t greedy). Unfortunately, the average vampire had the same reaction to an undiscovered non-baseline as most baselines would have to a sundress or a cool glass of water after few hours in the sun.

They just can’t get enough.

And so they usually end up killing (accidentally) their non-baseline. The ‘solution’ to this in several cases was the creation of harems or something equivalent so that a ‘good’ vampire could circulate through their group, making sure no one person got more attention than they should from the vampire, but the vampire remained fed.

But there’s always the question of why they should do this and why wouldn’t they fight back?

The simple answer is mostly that because what few vampires live to old age (or at least far in excess of what most baselines would consider, myself included), they tend to be warehouses of knowledge and possess not unreasonable amounts of wealth.

And given the choice of marrying Vlad, son of the pig farmer down the street, and dealing with the cult of domesticity in 1650, joining a convent, or the old well-off librarian or banker who can afford a large house and many servants, well, is it really a surprise?

Now this is not to say that all nobles or similar well-off folks of those ages were vampires. Just a healthy percentage (probably no more than about 5%, which is still quite a sum in my book).

Usually, these households were fairly quiet and the secret of the test of blood to join the house and of the blood to maintain the house had to be maintained, but eventually it usually slipped out and some paladin or Seer would come along and lead some kind of destructive campaign, dissolving the house and more often than not, destroying the libraries that many vampires keep.

Getting back to liches for a moment – liches don’t exist. Or at least nobody’s ever proved that they can become one, despite a substantial number of wizards being very close to making it possible.

It’s a bit like trying to make cold fusion – there’s plenty of folks who want to believe and who want to make it possible, but they’re on the fringe and they usually end up poisoning or otherwise killing themselves in the attempt to become truly immortal, sustained by naught but some manner of their own essentia generation and the world around them.

But because they’re wizards, they love their books. I could gesture vaguely at the local wizard librarian and various pop-culture depictions, but I think you probably get the idea.

Vampires are like that with books too. I think it has something to do with living for so long that it’s not about the having the knowledge, but rather having it all written down and accessible for years to come.

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So consequently, the modern vampires are both thrilled and shocked by the internet. Thrilled because with various sites available and all manner of modern methods, they can read and learn and absorb all manner of information in their long years. Shocked because of the impermanence of the internet compared with books.

And so the modern vampire is still very much an old-school technology user, willing and capable, but much more happy to receive a tome vice a PDF.

Of course, so am I. I got and get enough PDFs. If it’s something that someone actually printed or took the time to write down, it’s far more worthwhile. That said, it’s certainly easier to access the average 200 year old London cookbook via PDF rather than demanding a copy be printed out just for me (although I could do that as well).

One service I have started ‘marketing’ to the various vampires who are open and accepted members of the non-baseline community is a digitization of their libraries. Given that more than a few of their books should have been stolen by the British Museum, it’s quite a challenge. But in the process of having the book re-drafted, recreated, and remade, much as monks used to do with Bibles pre-Gutenberg, I’ve managed to convince a few that they need to digitize their libraries in the process.

It’s a very slow process, as anyone in book preservation and digitization will tell you, needing color correction for the aging manuscripts, careful turning of pages, and as high resolution on the scans as possible without damaging them to the point that they cannot be used for the recreation process.

Perhaps one bonus of the process though, is that the vampires are more open to remaking their books more readily (some of them, not all books are equivalent) and in even allowing the books to be unbound for easier digestion by both the scanning and the remaking.

The book makers I’ve started working with, rune wizard apprentices who need to pay the bills somehow, are fairly skilled, but definitely on the end of the spectrum where they like to focus on what they’re doing and not what they’re actually copying over. Which tends to be perfect for copying over what used to be a tome of “Laird Mallory’s Conqueste of the Vikinging Shieldemaidens Volume V”.

Yes, even the unliving remember what it is to have those urges. They’re undead, not dead.

And yes, reader, you wouldn’t believe what utter perverts most vampires are.

Anyway, we’re straying a bit.

How does a vampire get made in the first place? Well, there are a few necromantic wizards around. Always have been, always will be. They’re a bit like morticians for the non-baseline community. Nobody really likes having them around, but they’re a kind of necessity. And more than a few of them work as coroners and morticians, so it’s not odd for them to be surrounded by dead bodies 90% of the time.

Every so often, even more so before the world started getting more connected with mail services and the internet, some necromantic wizard would decide that they wanted an undead who could do more than shamble and required constant attention.

And so vampires were created. Their abilities tweaked a bit over time – allowing for minor shapeshifting, command of other undead, enhanced strength, and even ability to ingest common foods. Yes, that last one was a major achievement. Apparently, in being able to deal with all the acids, bases, and various fleshy poisons that we baselines eat on a nearly daily basis *glances at coffee cup*, having an undead able to do the same without becoming violently ill is an accomplishment.

Their freedom was never really conditional. Mostly an oversight that the vampires, even the early ones, never corrected the wizards creating them on. And given that said early vampires typically ended up killing their creators via overzealous feeding, the lessons were never really absorbed.

My neighbor, a Lady by age and marriage (rather than birthright), was born 1373, died in childbirth 1401, and raised as a vampire in 1402, approximately 5 weeks after she died and some 200 miles away from that village.

Despite her creator’s insistence, she never adopted a more young appearance and was perhaps the creator’s first ‘big’ mistake in necromancy.

However, her creator at least understood the basics of what he’d created and so did what he could to feed her. Given that she became the housekeeper and given free rein to maintain the household as she saw fit, she was content for a time as she came to terms with being a vampire, not least of which included becoming literate and acquainted with the basics of non-baseline society.

Her creator died some 10 years later and without a ready source of essentia, she quickly found herself starving and fought to find a way to keep fed.

She came dangerously close several times to either starving or being discovered, but having her background as a literate housekeeper, she managed to become housekeeper in a noble house, with access to their library and the people of the area, she began supporting both the house and the local doctor, ‘disposing’ of the blood taken from particular folks and ‘ensuring’ that some of them needed to be visited a bit more on the regular from the doctor.

She wasn’t as careful with this as she should have been and was eventually found out, caught drinking blood from a large vial.

The people of the age were superstitious enough and while she could have silenced the average person, she was caught by the lady of the house.

And so she ran, finding work as a physicians assistant some distance away and continuing to try and keep herself fed just above starving while trying to find a necromancer.

It wasn’t for another 30 years that she would find one and another 10 before she found one who would take her in, wizards being a skeptical lot, especially of unbound creations (which is in itself laugh, given the nature of vampires).

However, once she found one who took her in (and brought with her a few tomes of her creator), she moved from being a mere housekeeper to being more of a librarian, not only to the necromancer ‘master’ (her word, not mine), but to the local noble house. And so she became a bit more known to the non-baseline community.

Given her sapient and unbound status, she was considered an independent being, but still a woman, so the rules were still stacked against her. Since she was undead, the non-baseline community didn’t have a particular way of dealing with her, but did at least see its way into providing some manner of support network. Perhaps because she was a woman and because of European sensibilities at the time.

What’s the upshot of all this? Well, she’s fed but on a kind of lifeline. And being dependent isn’t something that any vampire does well.

So when she came to me and asked me for help in finding a new way to both keep her books and keep her fed, I decided it was a challenge worth taking. After all, if all the necromancers in the world haven’t solved it, who’s to say I can’t?

Alas, I didn’t realize what I was in for. As per usual.