Stream of Unconsciousness (Hypnovamp Hyperfixation Powerhours)

Spoiler: Lia's first post-Lexi hunt

"I saw you. You're the first thing Lexi's brought in. He boring you already?" Derrick made no attempt to hide the points of his teeth, tongue pressed to the tip of one in an expression of predatory delight that probably would have been hot if it weren't complimented by a personality like a hagfish.

"Yes." This was the sort of lie with a foundation in truth. It had been a week since the night she had nearly died, and she didn't have anything to do but wait. She was a weapon; she was meant to be used, and this past week had her feeling like she had been left in a drawer or under a pillow somewhere instead of kept ready on hand where she belonged.

“Poor shy boy doesn’t have any idea what to do with a hunter, does he?”

This time when Lia laughed it wasn’t because he was any kind of right. Lexi, of every vampire she had quite possibly ever met (barring perhaps Caelia, which wasn't a thought she wanted to examine right now,) probably knew most what to do with her. Sure he hadn't touched her- had been obscenely careful not to on multiple occasions- but the multitudinous sorts of people she had slept with weren't anyone she could be around for extended periods of time. It was why she hunted alone; in the long run, Lia just didn’t play nice with others. After a week she found Lexi at least tolerable; if she spent a week with Derrick she was pretty sure he’d be all kinds of dead.

He took her icy amusement the way she wanted, though: as agreement. It was easy. It would have been infuriatingly so, the way he let her in without a second thought, didn’t even bother to watch her hands when she dropped the knife into them. There was no suspicion when she stepped in close, and he didn’t even have time to drive the knife in, up under the parting of the ribs and straight into his heart. On perhaps any other night it would have been too easy, boring, not nearly enough challenge to actually mean anything to her. After the week she’d had, though, after almost dying, the time spent idle, the new rules to learn- after all that such an easy hunt where everything went right was viciously gratifying, a small gift from a cold and uncaring universe.

 

meant to yoink this when it was posted but I was in bed (and wanted to move it over here because it's talking about my 'verse and. organization good, theoretically.)

But vampverse hunters have their own sign as well! It has much more in common with, say, military hand gestures than an actual language, but hunters have co-opted a lot of signs to have more general meanings. For instance there's a sign (left hand in an upright fist, right hand flat and makes a sweeping gesture over it, left to right) that technically means either 'too many vampires' or 'too strong', usually used in context of a situation's safety. A lot of hunters will use it casually to mean "shit's fucked" in general. The matching sign for "weak" (almost identical, but the right hand passes under the left, from right to left) also gets used as a general complaint/negative modifier.

Amusingly because my hunters aren't wolves, the gesture for "wait" is almost the exact one you might use to tell a dog to stay; hand (usually left) laid flat, pushing downward if it needs emphasis. It's also one that gets a lot of casual usage as "hold on" or "please stop fucking talking".

 

So I´m gonna be stealing that one :P

 

One day in the Rave one of our hunters is going to use that on the other kind and hilarity will ensue?

 

Spoiler: Meet Meera and Jako. Nonserious self-harmy thoughts, unhealthy relationship with alcohol

With her hunting again time passed quickly, but eventfully. There was another party, much smaller but otherwise more or less the same. Another conversation with Violet where she pushed against Lexi’s claim over Lia, though this time Lia got to meet the other two major players present. Meera was a short, curvy woman, skin dark past the vampiric paleness, and she wore her long black hair in intricate styles, heavy on the braids. Like Lexi her features were surprisingly plain for a vampire, but she had a personality that could fill a room and made it clear what Caelia had seen in her. Her dark eyes didn’t have the same pull as Violet or Caelia but she was old enough to have gone a little strange, a sort of fluctuation that made her seem as if she was swaying like long hair underwater even when she was still. Also unlike Violet, she had pretty clearly written Lexi off as not at all a threat, even with a hunter; she treated him like a child with a new pet, without Violet's undercurrent of cautious malice. It was possible that Meera was even being genuine.

Jako on the other hand was an asshole, apparently having suffered some childhood injury that left his foot firmly and permanently placed in his mouth and severed his ability to care about it. He was a twiggy blond man with the sort of 80’s rockstar attractiveness, an energy that spoke of cocaine and narcissism. He alternated between aggressive flirting- emphasis on aggressive- and being casually demeaning, not just to Lia and Lexi but to anyone his attention settled on for more than a second. Meera patronized Lexi and treated Lia like someone else’s puppy; Jako had all but openly called Lexi weak and treated Lia like a toy, and she suspected he was the type who would tie his action figures to firecrackers growing up.

“Please tell me I get to stab him.” She had said as soon as they got home that night, laying out her cigarettes and getting started on fixing a drink. Lexi had been right, the gatherings had been smaller, easier to deal with, but meeting Jako made her want to peel her skin off and send it to be dry cleaned. That wasn’t exactly an option, so she settled for drinking until her emotions switched off and boiling herself like the world’s most murderous dumpling in the bath.

“No, Lia. You don’t get to stab him.” She would have pouted, but there was an unspoken ‘yet’ that gave her hope.

 

Since most hunters are raised communally family is... a pretty loose concept to your average hunter. Bloodlines are tracked because it's always good to have an idea what kind of psy a kid will have, and some similarly-aged children will stick together throughout training- hunter pairs that aren't a couple are often siblings, instead. Katalin's cadre includes her brother Jules, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's girlfriend who Kat is also involved with- an arrangement which is considered perfectly normal for hunters.

At the administrative level, though, things get a biiit more complicated. Watchers tend to be more involved with their families, since they have the time and connection; blades (actual hunters who hunt) are fairly isolated from the compounds once they're in the field, except for when they return to share information, seek healing, or alleviate the oath-strain. Solitary hunters like Lia especially can go quite a while- months, sometimes- without having to deal with the organization as a whole.

Though children are raised communally, they're typically under the indirect care of someone from the same family, or from a connected family. It's less like being raised by an uncle and more like dorm parents in a boarding school; they don't raise the kids directly, but are the ones they go to when they have problems, and are expected to handle both the childrens' health (mental and physical) and discipline.

Each family has a head, and the core organizational body of the hunters locally is a council made up of every family head. The role isn't inherited linearly, though often the child of a head is raised to take over, but the new head is chosen for a combination of strength in their family's specialty and general competence, and can be anyone in the family no matter how distant from the current head. However, a head doesn't exactly represent the family itself, but rather the family's purpose- non-head members of a family don't really get a say in the head's actions just because they're part of the family.

The other part of hunters being indirectly cared for by family members is that it helps to establish specializations among the families, though there are outliers for each. Lia is considered pretty nonstandard for a Ciura, and sometimes catches people off guard when they *think* they know what to expect from her because of her family.

The Ciura family are typically telepaths and blades, though the not uncommon telempaths born in the family are usually directed toward becoming watchers instead. All but the strongest telepaths are output only- they can only push their thoughts to others, rather than skimming surface thoughts from others. This makes them fairly useful for quick, silent communication, and they serve better within a cadre than as a solo hunter. Ciura are encouraged to be sociable, level-headed, adaptable, and responsible; cadres don't usually have a solid organization structure but will have someone who's more or less in charge, and if there's a Ciura it's probably them.

The Audley family are the other mainly-telepath/blade family in the area, and the two are both branches from one of the larger families. They're more likely to be a part of a cadre than a solo hunter, but are often far less social; Audley typically serve as scouts instead of leaders, which allows them to be more solitary than most non-solo hunters.

The Hartel family are kinetics, most often telekinetics. Unlike the Ciura or the Audley, they don't specialize overmuch; they and a few of the other primarily-kinetic families are your bog-standard hunters. Almost all are blades, but they can be solo or team players just as easily. Hartels usually trade raw strength for finer control, and are the least reckless of the 'grunt' families.

The Keriell family are a little weird in that they're all healers. Any non-healer who gets born into the family gets adopted out, and any non-Keriell healer born to the hunters gets raised and trained by them. Healers are incredibly valued by the hunters, and the Keriells are the only ones who consistently have them so despite being a fairly small family they have a lot of sway. They're encouraged to be gentle but firm, a careful tightrope of being approachable but also taking exactly zero shit.

 

Cooking skills! Which of your children has them, what kind.
Also, what do they always buy, gather, or forage for?

 

Just about all of the vampires y'all've met so far have forgotten how to cook, if they ever knew.
Lexi was taught how to make a few things as a kid by his grandma, but had mostly forgotten even before he was turned. Occasionally he'll watch Lia cook and get hit with the intense memory of how to make borsht, and then it passes. He was trying to learn how to cook for himself before he was turned, but he was pretty much on the College Student Diet.

Lia cooks! All hunters are taught how to cook; hunting burns a lot of calories so they tend to eat like athletes. Or. Y'know. Soldiers. Lia's diet is a little heavy on starch (pasta and potatoes especially) and meat (red, at a preference) but there's a good amount of veggies in there. Perhaps not quiiiite as much fruit as should be, though. Lia prefers strong flavors of any kind, so her cooking tends to be pretty heavily spiced and, because she's a horrible little masochist gremlin, usually pretty spicy too.
Kat was taught to cook same as Lia, and her diet looks much the same except a little less intense flavorwise. She likes savory and spice, though.
Vanessa wasn't raised a hunter and can barely cook. She eats like your standard computer goblin: stove ramen, takeout, microwave burritos, energy drinks.

Whether/what Laverna cooks depends on universe, but she's usually skirting the edge of malnutrition.
Original Flavor Lav/Tizzy can make very simple travel food but nothing fancy, and mostly survives off whatever she can beg, barter, or steal.
The Lady Seddon can't cook. Neither can her boss/mentor/master. This sometimes presents a problem.
Timefcku!Lav can cook a little, but rarely has access to either real groceries or a kitchen. She eats mostly instant garbage.
Witch!Lav and Mage!Lav couldn't cook, but she's determined to learn. Because she's got more magic than she can handle she needs a lot of sugar and a lot of fat as a buffer, so her diet is disproportionately sweets and things like pork belly and 'that should not be deep fried, but it is and I'm eating it'
Quizzy!Lav can also make simple travel food.

 

Whats your OCs Daemon/Patronus/Non copyrighted soul animal?

 

I did this one for daemons.

 

I have put up the first part (4 chapters) of Serene/Obscene

May have had a smol panic attack over allowing myself to be Seen like that but. It is there. It Exists.

 

Now everything I have finished of it is up. I got impatient.

 

I am really struggling with this bit

anyone wanna give prompts/ask questions?

 

*skitters in*
Caelia's opinions on various met gala dresses?

 

Oh man.

So she shares the opinion that the met gala should be extra as FUCK. She admittedly doesn't care too much about the theme, but she's very 'commit or quit' when it comes to being completely over the top, and thinks anyone who showed up in a basic dress or a plain tux ought to be dragged out and shot.

She likes the pearl dress and the slutty lady liberty, she would wear Nikkie de Jager's dress (it's her colors and floral? -yoink-) and would talk Violet into Megan Fox's.

 

caelia, seeing the egg dress or the woman's vote from that congress woman: you may live (and enjoy the gala)
caelia seeing channing tatum's boring ass suit: [cocks shotgun]

 

exactly

The egg dress may get a raised eyebrow on aesthetic principles, but she'd find it acceptable. Channing Tatum's suit though? Life privileges revoked.

 

I know you´ve mentioned a few, but what sort of mage specializations exist?

 

There are only a few solid specializations. Magic is divided into kinetic (deals with the physical) and thaumaturgic (deals with the nonphysical) and your average mage will specialize in one or the other, and may prefer one subset, but finding, say, a kineticist who's a pure fire mage is incredibly rare. Still, mages will focus their attention on a single facet of their chosen discipline- a pure fire mage might be rare, but a weather mage isn't. Healers are typically highly specialized, because it takes a lot of attention and dedication to become one, so they tend to focus on healing exclusively. Seers, too, for similar reasons- mage!Lav is rare in being a seer/storm mage combo, and if her soul weren't fucked six ways to Sunday she'd probably be a pure seer. Magic that crosses the border between the two branches, like necromancy, is also going to be a specialization by necessity- you don't have the time to be a necromancer and a kineticist or a thaumaturge, you've really got to dedicate to necromancy (or other inter-branch disciplines.)

But, for example dreamwalking is a subset of thaumaturgy, and a thaumaturge might prefer dreamwalking, but they won't be considered specialized even if they become a master. Dreamwalking is a shallow pool compared to something like healing- a master dreamwalker will always be considered a master thaumaturge whose strength is dreamwalking.

 

I wasn't tagged, but I'll do the WIP game too. I can't do the bottom emoji here but pls imagine it in this space.

Ida Becomes A Hunter
Ida Shorts (1-9 for a specific one)
Date Night (Nico and Gale)
Orphaned Snippets
The Porn Oneshot With Pietro In It