My ninth novel
Mar. 11th, 2011 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdI have contracted for a minimum of 65,000 words of vampires, to be delivered by Sept 1. Yes, there is an advance involved.
I am terribly excited.
So, in the interests of making my world believable, and my vampires not complete idiots--except those whose brains have rotted, of course--I have been noodling.
Vampirism is a virus. It incubates in its host from the time of the initial blood ingestion, for anywhere from three days to a month. Vampires do bite, and if they drain the victim during or after the exchange, it's a three day incubation. In case of accidental ingestion, the virus will incubate up to a month, during which time it replicates in the RNA, gradually causing the host to "die," then return.
It does not end decay, merely slows it over centuries instead of years. A fresh vampire will be ravenously hungry for the first month as the body adjusts to the new life. The first century of a vampire's life is its most powerful, but the more established vampiric organizations are designed to squelch competition during this period. A two hundred year old vampire is at his peak. A three hundred one is slipping. A four hundred year old vamp is rotting out. By 500, they tend to be mindless things, devouring and ravening. Anything beyond that is pretty much a snapping skeleton held together by leathery sinew, eating out of habit to feed organs long decayed away. The organizations usually put them down at the first signs of blatant decay.
Sun exposure hastens the decay. Vamps are destroyed by fire, a stake to the heart and destruction of the brain. They have slightly greater strength than humans. Running water, garlic, holy symbols, roses, seeds, lemons with spikes, none of those work.
Should a vampire sire a child during the incubation period, the virus lies dormant in the child's cells. (the incubation is not long enough to conceive and carry) Most of these live out their lives and die of old age. Should such a child meet a violent end at any point in their life, they return almost immediately, not as a vampire, but as an Undying, a revenant with powers of regeneration. These are very rare, less than 100,000 in the whole world. Being immortal eventually drives them insane. Every Undying has at least two diagnosable mental illnesses, of a type more severe than personality disorders.
The Council of Eternity tries to find and train the Undying to hunt vampires. They also try to create a support network to deal with culture shock and constant change. They have about a 50% success rate in recruitment and training. The support network is less successful. The Undying do not work and play well with each other, since too many diagnoses in the same room always gets ugly. The Council, in recent years, has begun GPS chipping the Undying, just behind the ear. There are some who have taken the training and gone off on their own.
So, where have I gone totally off the rails?
I am terribly excited.
So, in the interests of making my world believable, and my vampires not complete idiots--except those whose brains have rotted, of course--I have been noodling.
Vampirism is a virus. It incubates in its host from the time of the initial blood ingestion, for anywhere from three days to a month. Vampires do bite, and if they drain the victim during or after the exchange, it's a three day incubation. In case of accidental ingestion, the virus will incubate up to a month, during which time it replicates in the RNA, gradually causing the host to "die," then return.
It does not end decay, merely slows it over centuries instead of years. A fresh vampire will be ravenously hungry for the first month as the body adjusts to the new life. The first century of a vampire's life is its most powerful, but the more established vampiric organizations are designed to squelch competition during this period. A two hundred year old vampire is at his peak. A three hundred one is slipping. A four hundred year old vamp is rotting out. By 500, they tend to be mindless things, devouring and ravening. Anything beyond that is pretty much a snapping skeleton held together by leathery sinew, eating out of habit to feed organs long decayed away. The organizations usually put them down at the first signs of blatant decay.
Sun exposure hastens the decay. Vamps are destroyed by fire, a stake to the heart and destruction of the brain. They have slightly greater strength than humans. Running water, garlic, holy symbols, roses, seeds, lemons with spikes, none of those work.
Should a vampire sire a child during the incubation period, the virus lies dormant in the child's cells. (the incubation is not long enough to conceive and carry) Most of these live out their lives and die of old age. Should such a child meet a violent end at any point in their life, they return almost immediately, not as a vampire, but as an Undying, a revenant with powers of regeneration. These are very rare, less than 100,000 in the whole world. Being immortal eventually drives them insane. Every Undying has at least two diagnosable mental illnesses, of a type more severe than personality disorders.
The Council of Eternity tries to find and train the Undying to hunt vampires. They also try to create a support network to deal with culture shock and constant change. They have about a 50% success rate in recruitment and training. The support network is less successful. The Undying do not work and play well with each other, since too many diagnoses in the same room always gets ugly. The Council, in recent years, has begun GPS chipping the Undying, just behind the ear. There are some who have taken the training and gone off on their own.
So, where have I gone totally off the rails?
no subject
Also don't care (personally) to see another vamp' uni' where vamps walk around in the daylight, eat solid food, and are essentially just humans with fangs & a certain fondness for blood.
Also not wanting to see a comic book uni' where the good guys (your Undying) are sacred cows who can never make a mistake or be killed. Okay, it kinda kills the whole comic book if Spiderman or Wolverine gets decapitated or blown to smitherines, but it also gets tedious for the readers & fans when a main character is immune to harm and basically unstoppable... even when up against a credible opponent who should be able to defeat them.
How do you kill something that regenerates & cannot die?
You destroy all tissue that could logically regenerate, usually with fire or acid. (Duh...) There is also the option of sealing the un-killable thing inside something it can't escape from while it is recovering and then storing it someplace secure. If you can't kill it, fine... just remove it from the game board & keep it on ice. Personally, I always liked the idea of an oil drum welded shut, then surrounded by quick-drying cement... and then dumping the resulting cement block over the side of a boat into a really deep part of the ocean. "Let's see you get out of & come back from this one, Dracula."
No human minions?
Why not? Why risk your own kind when there are hundreds of highly expendable lesser creatures to be had who will risk life & limb for you in exchange for enough cash? ...Or at least wake you from your slumber if your lair is intruded upon? Human minions also make for tasty snacks if worst comes to worst; kinda like emergency rations. If vamps can't operate in the daylight... are they just too (Buffy The Vapmire Slayer) stupid to hire somebody who can if they have this ability?
As a possible sideline idea: Maybe, if you choose to go with the parasite idea, the vampire parasite could be of alien origin? Perhaps the vampire parasite carries the vampire virus. The virus can be passed to another in sex to produce unintended off-spring (the Undying), but the parasite can't be transmitted in this way. This could explain the difference between Vampire & Undying.
Just trying to be helpful...