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Lately I've been redeveloping the first Vampire: the Masquerade character I ever had, a Malkavian named Holly. Originally, she was based on an extremely thin premise: the premise that I am about to expire in just under two minutes! Get it, moosebrain?
No, not quite. But close. She was very loosely based on the character of Holly, the computer, from Red Dwarf, specifically a line in the book version after he/she has had his/her intelligence compressed (I use both because it's female in the show, but still male in the book), along the lines of "you don't understand. I know everything, and I want to share it with you. You could ask me, is there a God, and what is His address?" I thought that the idea of a Malk who thought she knew everything would be interesting, and ran with it.
Holly has always been my favourite character (as first characters are wont to be), but let's just say I was a little... naive... and silly about her personal background. (I mean come on, ditching the mortal connection by basically being a runaway, and having a random Embrace at a nightclub by someone named "Caramel, the sweetest on the street"?) More importantly, I really had no clue what was "Malkavian" about her. This was a point in time where Malks hadn't been developed much beyond "kooky vampires" in the books, and so you had huge rashes of people wearing bunny ears and thinking that meant something. I was determined not to be that sort of Malk, but I still wasn't very detailed or very good about it.
That was partly the way our games were, though. This was a large-group LARP, which mainly consisted of "mill around and interact in character, with no specific plot; storyteller will introduce plot threads if we get bored". One didn't need a lot of detail just to mill around. We also got stupid amounts of experience and by the time we stopped playing, Holly had gone from a base character to having like 16 dots of Disciplines, including ridiculous stuff like Serpentis and Vicissitude. Did I forget to mention that this character, while being 11th gen and later Diablerizing to 10th was simultaneously a primogen and an anarch? Yeah. Our game was like that. Maybe it was the fact that the average player age was 17 or so. But I digress.
The point is, I'm redoing the character, keeping a number of basic, original-inspiration elements -- such as her having been an un-awakened changeling (sidhe) before her Embrace, thus being haunted by this sense of a missing birthright and having some various "faerie left-overs" merits and flaws, and the whole "I know everything, please listen to me while I tell you" bit -- but making her much more of a character, if I possibly can. I seem to have added into the mix, rather than the Holly "what is God's address" bit, the Hitchhiker's Guide "Total Perspective Vortex" effect. (Needs more stuff in the Embrace story about how it was to have a faerie soul destroyed, even if she didn't know that's what was going on, and more leading up to that about her not-quite-Chrysalis-ing, and more out-of-character stuff about how the few changelings that were sensing her impending Chrysalis went "what the fuck?" when she disappeared off their radar.) Anyway, I'm not really sure why I'm bothering to get so into this, as the likelihood that I will ever actually play the character is about zilch, but hey. It's fun.
"...if there is one thing one cannot afford to have, it is a sense of proportion."
Seeing the infinity of creation in Malkav's cracked mirror (or is that the infinity of cracked creation in Malkav's mirror? Maybe the creation of infinity in cracked, mirrored Malkav?) was a bit too much for Holly. She simultaneously groks and denies being an infinitesimal speck on an infinitesimal speck in some backwater spiral galaxy. Any sense of importance, of significance, of meaning something went right out the window (mirror?), leaving her hollow and depressed. (Depression) To make matters worse, Holly was a changeling (of the Sidhe kith) who had not yet undergone her Chrysalis before she was Embraced, so she is haunted by a feeling that some meaning or power that she should have had by birthright has been ripped away from her, that there is "something missing" from her soul that makes her lost and broken. She usually overcompensates for her depression with a bouncy, energetic demeanour, cracking wise at every opportunity.
Holly reacts to the core realization of insignificance in a number of odd ways. Feeling that dressing normally would break up her mental outline and make her "disappear", she always wears only a single colour at any given time, "so I can't be lost in the infinity". (Power-Object Fixation) She is constantly collecting as many bits of "wisdom" as she can (though the definition of "wisdom" may often not jive with what other vampires would think), "because if I keep growing and growing then I won't be insignificant anymore", and often trying to tell people about all the knowledge she saw in the mirror and has "in here somewhere *taps head*". As the Universe does not suffer itself to be comprehended, however, it generally comes out rather incoherently. It's hard to separate one impression or characteristic from another when you've seen it all at once. (Synaesthesia) Whether she's doing this out of an altruistic desire to spread enlightenment, or just to make others feel as insignificant as she does by revealing to them the truth of their inconsequence, is uncertain (probably both).
For Holly, Pranking is more a personal comfort than a philosophical pursuit: for a moment she mattered, she caused. She knows, though, that the best Pranks are the anonymous and subtle ones, yielding no specific recognition of her. In general, therefore, she refrains from Pranking as too painful and contributory to her feelings of pointlessness, but occasionally uses it as a vehicle for opening eyes to the infinite cracks that Malkav'd the mirror, a non-verbal reflection of her failed attempts to explain it all in jumbled words.
(For the following, I found it easier to write in first-person perspective)
What was my life like before the Embrace?
I was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, California. I'm pretty glad that I managed to escape being what other "baby boomers" have now become, although I'm not sure that undeath is really a fair price to pay for it. Still, it's rather too late now. LA was a pretty glamourous place to be back then. I was about to say that Hollywood wasn't as shallow, greedy and corrupt as it is now, but maybe it just was in different ways. Still, the allure of the silver screen was rather more innocent then than it is now. You know all those cheesy Westerns, and stupid sci-fi flicks where they had to make up what the moon was like because they hadn't been there yet, and big historically inaccurate epics that they had in the 50s? Bread and butter to me as a kid. I loved spending Saturday afternoons at the movies. Science fiction double feature! *chuckles* I had the greatest imagination then. I've never been quite sure when I lost that... but I digress. The 60s were a damned interesting time to be a teenager and young adult, as I'm sure you're aware, what with drugs on the one side, communists on the other, and atom bombs on the gripping side, or whatever shit it was they were telling us to try to keep us in line. (Power to the people, baby!)
Despite spending hours each day, even during high school, in my own private daydreams running around with unicorns and faeries and strolling through enchanted forests (it all seemed so real at the time... actually I still really miss it... but I don't seem to be able to invest it with the life that I used to... it really gets to me sometimes... ahem.. pardon me, I digress again), I did pretty well in school, and after I graduated from high school in 1967, I was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles. Shortly after the start of my senior year, I got serious with Jonathan, a boy I had been seeing for about eight months, and moved in with him. My parents didn't think a lot of that, but hey, we were young, and fuck what the parents thought. After I graduated we moved up to San Francisco together in 1971, with my parents and his mother (his parents were divorced, and his mother wasn't speaking to his father) wondering when and if we were going to get married. For reasons which should shortly become obvious, if they weren't already, that never happened.
When was my Embrace, and what was it like? How old was I? Who was my sire?
I was Embraced in 1972, being 23 years old at the time. (How clinical that sounds! I have never liked the texture or taste of the word "clinical". Too much to do with clinics. Hospitals. Doctors. Needles. Forcible unconsciousness. *shivers* No.) No, see, how it happened was this. Skipping off to San Francisco with Jonathan had estranged me somewhat from my parents, and we hadn't kept in regular touch after I graduated from UCLA. So you can imagine that I was slightly surprised when I got a call one bleak December day from the lawyer who was administering their estate - their what now? Yes, their estate. They had both been killed by an armed burglar who broke into the house - my father shot in his sleep, and my mother while trying to shoot the burglar herself. (Kids, if you're going to keep a gun "for protection", it helps to be able to use the motherfucker.)
About four months later, I was just starting to cope with my parents' deaths. I wasn't doing too badly; I was eating, I was going to work. (Waitressing - what a useful thing to be doing with that Philosophy degree.) But then Murphy kicked me in the ass. One night after picking me up from a late night at work, Jonathan was killed when a drunk driver hit us flat-on in the driver's side of the car. Crunch. Now, yer late 1960s vehicles weren't near as crashworthy as the shit you have nowadays, you see. I survived with only minor injuries, being on the lee side of the impact. But Jonathan, mercifully, was killed instantly. Well, mercifully for him, perhaps. I, ah, didn't take it too well, as you might guess.
After a couple weeks of sheer nervous breakdown and relapsing into grief about my parents, a girlfriend of mine recommended I see this psychiatrist her aunt or cousin or someone had been seeing, a Dr. Ellian Migron. "He keeps some odd hours, but he's really good. Really compassionate. Trust me, he can help you." Good job I had some money saved up; shrinks weren't cheap then, like they aren't now. And I've got to say, he really wasn't a bad guy. Young-looking, and actually kind of attractive, too. Listened very quietly to everything I had to say. I remember thinking he had a strange spark in his eyes, like he could see patterns in my psyche without my even talking, like he understood what was going on in my head just by looking at it.
"The world is so empty for me now," I often said. And one evening, he said, putting his hands gently on my shoulders, "No, it isn't. The web of creation is vastly interconnected, and you are part of it. Let me show you. Now hold still, this won't hurt more than a moment."
The web of creation. Sure. Of all creation. Oh, it's there all right. And I suppose it probably is interconnected. It sure whispers and buzzes and glows and exudes chocolate scents and is prickly all the time like it's interconnected. But seeing it all like that, all at once - it was so huge. Horrifically huge. You have no fucking idea. You don't want any fucking idea. Because being a tiny dot on a tiny dot in some backwater galaxy... *shudders*
I believe his intentions were good, I really do. I don't think he meant to show me how meaningless I really am. But the best-laid plans o'mice an' Malks...
questions still to be answered:
How much time do I spend among other Kindred? What do I think about the Camarilla and the Traditions? Is there any position I aspire to?
What do I think about anarchs and the Sabbat? Antediluvians, the Jyhad and Gehenna?
How much time do I spend among kine? What do I think of mortals? Do I still have ties to mortal family and friends? If not, why not? If so, how much do they know?
How do I feel about feeding? Have I ever killed to feed? How do I hunt, and where? Do I prefer any particular kind(s) of blood? Do I enjoy or avoid intoxicants in blood?
When did I meet my ghoul? How and when did he become so? Do I have any plans to Embrace him? What is his personal history?
Besides wearing all one colour, what is my style of dress? How do I do my hair? Do I wear makeup or jewellery? Do I generally bother to breathe, blink, and flush my skin warm when out in the world?
Do I like living in the city? Have I ever travelled? How is my haven secured? How is it decorated? Do I have any other place I could escape to if necessary?
What do I do besides "vampire things" - in my spare time, if you will? What am I learning, or doing for leisure? What do I do to earn my resources?
PS. Here is the drawing I mentioned in this entry:
No, not quite. But close. She was very loosely based on the character of Holly, the computer, from Red Dwarf, specifically a line in the book version after he/she has had his/her intelligence compressed (I use both because it's female in the show, but still male in the book), along the lines of "you don't understand. I know everything, and I want to share it with you. You could ask me, is there a God, and what is His address?" I thought that the idea of a Malk who thought she knew everything would be interesting, and ran with it.
Holly has always been my favourite character (as first characters are wont to be), but let's just say I was a little... naive... and silly about her personal background. (I mean come on, ditching the mortal connection by basically being a runaway, and having a random Embrace at a nightclub by someone named "Caramel, the sweetest on the street"?) More importantly, I really had no clue what was "Malkavian" about her. This was a point in time where Malks hadn't been developed much beyond "kooky vampires" in the books, and so you had huge rashes of people wearing bunny ears and thinking that meant something. I was determined not to be that sort of Malk, but I still wasn't very detailed or very good about it.
That was partly the way our games were, though. This was a large-group LARP, which mainly consisted of "mill around and interact in character, with no specific plot; storyteller will introduce plot threads if we get bored". One didn't need a lot of detail just to mill around. We also got stupid amounts of experience and by the time we stopped playing, Holly had gone from a base character to having like 16 dots of Disciplines, including ridiculous stuff like Serpentis and Vicissitude. Did I forget to mention that this character, while being 11th gen and later Diablerizing to 10th was simultaneously a primogen and an anarch? Yeah. Our game was like that. Maybe it was the fact that the average player age was 17 or so. But I digress.
The point is, I'm redoing the character, keeping a number of basic, original-inspiration elements -- such as her having been an un-awakened changeling (sidhe) before her Embrace, thus being haunted by this sense of a missing birthright and having some various "faerie left-overs" merits and flaws, and the whole "I know everything, please listen to me while I tell you" bit -- but making her much more of a character, if I possibly can. I seem to have added into the mix, rather than the Holly "what is God's address" bit, the Hitchhiker's Guide "Total Perspective Vortex" effect. (Needs more stuff in the Embrace story about how it was to have a faerie soul destroyed, even if she didn't know that's what was going on, and more leading up to that about her not-quite-Chrysalis-ing, and more out-of-character stuff about how the few changelings that were sensing her impending Chrysalis went "what the fuck?" when she disappeared off their radar.) Anyway, I'm not really sure why I'm bothering to get so into this, as the likelihood that I will ever actually play the character is about zilch, but hey. It's fun.
"...if there is one thing one cannot afford to have, it is a sense of proportion."
Seeing the infinity of creation in Malkav's cracked mirror (or is that the infinity of cracked creation in Malkav's mirror? Maybe the creation of infinity in cracked, mirrored Malkav?) was a bit too much for Holly. She simultaneously groks and denies being an infinitesimal speck on an infinitesimal speck in some backwater spiral galaxy. Any sense of importance, of significance, of meaning something went right out the window (mirror?), leaving her hollow and depressed. (Depression) To make matters worse, Holly was a changeling (of the Sidhe kith) who had not yet undergone her Chrysalis before she was Embraced, so she is haunted by a feeling that some meaning or power that she should have had by birthright has been ripped away from her, that there is "something missing" from her soul that makes her lost and broken. She usually overcompensates for her depression with a bouncy, energetic demeanour, cracking wise at every opportunity.
Holly reacts to the core realization of insignificance in a number of odd ways. Feeling that dressing normally would break up her mental outline and make her "disappear", she always wears only a single colour at any given time, "so I can't be lost in the infinity". (Power-Object Fixation) She is constantly collecting as many bits of "wisdom" as she can (though the definition of "wisdom" may often not jive with what other vampires would think), "because if I keep growing and growing then I won't be insignificant anymore", and often trying to tell people about all the knowledge she saw in the mirror and has "in here somewhere *taps head*". As the Universe does not suffer itself to be comprehended, however, it generally comes out rather incoherently. It's hard to separate one impression or characteristic from another when you've seen it all at once. (Synaesthesia) Whether she's doing this out of an altruistic desire to spread enlightenment, or just to make others feel as insignificant as she does by revealing to them the truth of their inconsequence, is uncertain (probably both).
For Holly, Pranking is more a personal comfort than a philosophical pursuit: for a moment she mattered, she caused. She knows, though, that the best Pranks are the anonymous and subtle ones, yielding no specific recognition of her. In general, therefore, she refrains from Pranking as too painful and contributory to her feelings of pointlessness, but occasionally uses it as a vehicle for opening eyes to the infinite cracks that Malkav'd the mirror, a non-verbal reflection of her failed attempts to explain it all in jumbled words.
(For the following, I found it easier to write in first-person perspective)
What was my life like before the Embrace?
I was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, California. I'm pretty glad that I managed to escape being what other "baby boomers" have now become, although I'm not sure that undeath is really a fair price to pay for it. Still, it's rather too late now. LA was a pretty glamourous place to be back then. I was about to say that Hollywood wasn't as shallow, greedy and corrupt as it is now, but maybe it just was in different ways. Still, the allure of the silver screen was rather more innocent then than it is now. You know all those cheesy Westerns, and stupid sci-fi flicks where they had to make up what the moon was like because they hadn't been there yet, and big historically inaccurate epics that they had in the 50s? Bread and butter to me as a kid. I loved spending Saturday afternoons at the movies. Science fiction double feature! *chuckles* I had the greatest imagination then. I've never been quite sure when I lost that... but I digress. The 60s were a damned interesting time to be a teenager and young adult, as I'm sure you're aware, what with drugs on the one side, communists on the other, and atom bombs on the gripping side, or whatever shit it was they were telling us to try to keep us in line. (Power to the people, baby!)
Despite spending hours each day, even during high school, in my own private daydreams running around with unicorns and faeries and strolling through enchanted forests (it all seemed so real at the time... actually I still really miss it... but I don't seem to be able to invest it with the life that I used to... it really gets to me sometimes... ahem.. pardon me, I digress again), I did pretty well in school, and after I graduated from high school in 1967, I was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles. Shortly after the start of my senior year, I got serious with Jonathan, a boy I had been seeing for about eight months, and moved in with him. My parents didn't think a lot of that, but hey, we were young, and fuck what the parents thought. After I graduated we moved up to San Francisco together in 1971, with my parents and his mother (his parents were divorced, and his mother wasn't speaking to his father) wondering when and if we were going to get married. For reasons which should shortly become obvious, if they weren't already, that never happened.
When was my Embrace, and what was it like? How old was I? Who was my sire?
I was Embraced in 1972, being 23 years old at the time. (How clinical that sounds! I have never liked the texture or taste of the word "clinical". Too much to do with clinics. Hospitals. Doctors. Needles. Forcible unconsciousness. *shivers* No.) No, see, how it happened was this. Skipping off to San Francisco with Jonathan had estranged me somewhat from my parents, and we hadn't kept in regular touch after I graduated from UCLA. So you can imagine that I was slightly surprised when I got a call one bleak December day from the lawyer who was administering their estate - their what now? Yes, their estate. They had both been killed by an armed burglar who broke into the house - my father shot in his sleep, and my mother while trying to shoot the burglar herself. (Kids, if you're going to keep a gun "for protection", it helps to be able to use the motherfucker.)
About four months later, I was just starting to cope with my parents' deaths. I wasn't doing too badly; I was eating, I was going to work. (Waitressing - what a useful thing to be doing with that Philosophy degree.) But then Murphy kicked me in the ass. One night after picking me up from a late night at work, Jonathan was killed when a drunk driver hit us flat-on in the driver's side of the car. Crunch. Now, yer late 1960s vehicles weren't near as crashworthy as the shit you have nowadays, you see. I survived with only minor injuries, being on the lee side of the impact. But Jonathan, mercifully, was killed instantly. Well, mercifully for him, perhaps. I, ah, didn't take it too well, as you might guess.
After a couple weeks of sheer nervous breakdown and relapsing into grief about my parents, a girlfriend of mine recommended I see this psychiatrist her aunt or cousin or someone had been seeing, a Dr. Ellian Migron. "He keeps some odd hours, but he's really good. Really compassionate. Trust me, he can help you." Good job I had some money saved up; shrinks weren't cheap then, like they aren't now. And I've got to say, he really wasn't a bad guy. Young-looking, and actually kind of attractive, too. Listened very quietly to everything I had to say. I remember thinking he had a strange spark in his eyes, like he could see patterns in my psyche without my even talking, like he understood what was going on in my head just by looking at it.
"The world is so empty for me now," I often said. And one evening, he said, putting his hands gently on my shoulders, "No, it isn't. The web of creation is vastly interconnected, and you are part of it. Let me show you. Now hold still, this won't hurt more than a moment."
The web of creation. Sure. Of all creation. Oh, it's there all right. And I suppose it probably is interconnected. It sure whispers and buzzes and glows and exudes chocolate scents and is prickly all the time like it's interconnected. But seeing it all like that, all at once - it was so huge. Horrifically huge. You have no fucking idea. You don't want any fucking idea. Because being a tiny dot on a tiny dot in some backwater galaxy... *shudders*
I believe his intentions were good, I really do. I don't think he meant to show me how meaningless I really am. But the best-laid plans o'mice an' Malks...
questions still to be answered:
How much time do I spend among other Kindred? What do I think about the Camarilla and the Traditions? Is there any position I aspire to?
What do I think about anarchs and the Sabbat? Antediluvians, the Jyhad and Gehenna?
How much time do I spend among kine? What do I think of mortals? Do I still have ties to mortal family and friends? If not, why not? If so, how much do they know?
How do I feel about feeding? Have I ever killed to feed? How do I hunt, and where? Do I prefer any particular kind(s) of blood? Do I enjoy or avoid intoxicants in blood?
When did I meet my ghoul? How and when did he become so? Do I have any plans to Embrace him? What is his personal history?
Besides wearing all one colour, what is my style of dress? How do I do my hair? Do I wear makeup or jewellery? Do I generally bother to breathe, blink, and flush my skin warm when out in the world?
Do I like living in the city? Have I ever travelled? How is my haven secured? How is it decorated? Do I have any other place I could escape to if necessary?
What do I do besides "vampire things" - in my spare time, if you will? What am I learning, or doing for leisure? What do I do to earn my resources?
PS. Here is the drawing I mentioned in this entry:
no subject
Date: Mar. 31st, 2004 09:21 am (UTC)From:did they skip off to Seattle or San Francisco? Both cities are referenced exactly once.
(also, would you like feedback on the unanswered questions?)
no subject
Date: Mar. 31st, 2004 10:50 am (UTC)From:Feed back on whether they are good questions to ask, you mean?
no subject
Date: Mar. 31st, 2004 12:31 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: Mar. 31st, 2004 01:13 pm (UTC)From:no subject