i got a gig, telling stories to a gang of witches they sit semicircle round me, cross legged and i tell them every mundane detail of my day, draw out my fears and shakes and angers and small, desolate disappointments like strings of sugared candy. recount momentary crushes on strangers in alleyways, on buses, in half-open coats they’re all like—500 years old, give or take a decade they don’t get these things anymore. some part of you dries up so they just listen, and then they take me to the door and they put eighty dollars in my hand, from a chest in the corner piled high with cash, in layers of color, some older, some foreign and i think about breaking in. but they could kill me so easily, and they pay me over minimum wage, so i just smile and cry on the bus, and feel odd thinking about telling them next week, about crying on the bus.
i’ve got this girl, a couple weeks now, and i didn’t even mean to swore i wouldn’t date when i got into this part of town it’s like being a chip in a hurricane, marveling at the massive unable to get your feet on the ground. but i got this girl she’s got teeth made to pierce the important veins, but she swears she’s seven years dry and she has bags of red stuff in her fridge so I believe her. but, you know, they say vampires can do that put thoughts in your head, so maybe i don’t believe her.
i think a lot about love how it gets in your veins, parasitic how it fucks up your brain i think a lot about how it comes on you about how it pulls the rug out how it blows foundations open for the marrow i think a lot about how i don’t want it i think about that while she puts me on the floor and puts her mouth on my neck, but doesn’t bite
love’s always coming for you. it’s an invisible force sure and utter as the divine right of kings as the bus charging fifty cents more every year
against my will, i am sent to bring you to dinner against my will, i am in love with you against my will, i am opening, i am opening against my will i am opening the door
– urban fantasy; r.m.s
Tags:
#storytime #poetry #witches #vampires #death mention #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Concept: immortal vampire scion of a dying royal line going to increasingly desperate lengths to get their various relations married off in a way that keeps themselves as far from the line of succession as possible, because the peculiar interaction between holy symbols and the vampiric condition means that if they ever actually inherit the divine right of kings, they’ll immediately explode.
So just… A really old guy forcing all of his grandkids to marry each other?
Precisely the opposite. Keeping it all in the family (so to speak) is a strategy for minimising competing claims to the succession; our hypothetical vampire wants there to be as many competing claims as possible, so that if one cadet branch dies out or gets delegitimised, there will be others to take up the slack.
If they’re the scion, they’ll have to go to some lengths to avoid it… depending on where they fall in the lineage. But, if it’s the English monarchy, they can just profess Roman Catholicism. Immediate disqualification.
I was about to propose some complicated metaphysical reason why that option isn’t on the table; upon consideration, however, it’s much funnier if there’s no reason it wouldn’t work, but the vampire would literally rather die than become Catholic.
Tags:
#vampires #story ideas I will never write #incest cw #death tw
fun fact! mirrors reflect each color equally, except for green. if you have ever seen a mirror perfectly aligned in front of another mirror, a.k.a. an infinite mirror, you can look through it and see that it becomes greener and greener. therefore, mirrors are technically green!
If you look edgewise through a sheet of glass you see that it’s green because of iron impurities (Google for it). Reducing the iron reduces the green.
Perfectly aligning mirrors to multiply reflections also multiplies the apparent thickness of the glass, and the green tint becomes more apparent the “deeper” each reflection seems to be.
Science is like history: it was never this interesting at school. :-)
Yep! And this is because – I’m sorry to say – mirrors are not a unique or separate substance with magical properties. Mirrors are silvered glass. They have two colors: the color of the silver, and the color of the glass. The “silver” doesn’t have to be silver, though it usually is because mirrors are traditionally made with silver nitrate, because it’s a whitish metal. You can have mirrors silvered in gold or black or red. You take literally any piece of glass, pour a coating of silver on it, seal it, and call it a mirror.
You have to seal it because otherwise it tarnishes and spots. Even though the glass protects it from air, the silver oxidizes just like any other silver, which is why antique mirrors have that funky age-spotted look.
Mirrors used in science are usually pure clear glass with no impurities (so the glass has no color) and are silvered in gold or aluminum, so they are white or gold. A warm-toned mirror would have a pink glass and would make things have a rose-gold look. Phryne Fisher, in the books, has a mirror with pink glass.
(Mirrors silvered in silver – that is, most mirrors you’ve seen – are probably faintly grey from the silver and faintly green from the cheap glass, but it doesn’t need to concern you at all – even if you noticed a strong color, you’re often so used to looking in them that your brain edits out any discrepancy – like how your nose doesn’t get in the way of your vision even though it’s right in front of your eyes all of the time.)
My grandmother had a mirror that was silvered in gold. It was a little disconcerting. The silver in mirrors is why vampires don’t have reflections. (And why the cutlery at Castle Dracula was made of gold.)
It’s true! (Source is The Journal Of I Read It Somewhere One Time, so take it with a truckload of salt, but I’m pretty sure it was a published book and not the internet, so like, only a pickup truck, not a dump truck.)
Watsonian explanation: Silver as an entity and/or concept was upset about being used to pay Judas, so as some kind of compensation God gave it evil-fighting powers, and this is why vampires don’t have reflections in silvered mirrors as well as why werewolves are killed by silver bullets. (Also works for vampires not showing up on film, because silver nitrate, although obviously that isn’t part of the ~*~original folklore~*~ and also doesn’t explain digital cameras.)
Doylist explanation: A lot of things that are traditionally anti-vampire turn out to have antibacterial properties- the only ones I remember are garlic and silver, but I think there were others- so supposedly when anti-vampire treatments helped somebody out of a decline or whatever they were actually helping fight off an infection.
What about a gold mirror with antibacterial soap or something sprayed on it?
And if it’s the silver in the cameras that made them not show up on film, that means that digital is entirely different (unless they use silver in the manufacturing – which i’m pretty sure they don’t – or if some rich person has a silver encased camera – but that still probably wouldn’t work because the lense couldn’t be encased in silver otherwise it wouldn’t work) so basically we need a modern story where the Vampires are having to come up with clever things to stay out of photos where possible because DIGITAL, but there’s that one vampire who photobombs everything and is famous on the internet for it because he’s literally everywhere.
Fun addition: DSLR digital cameras still use mirrors to flip the image into the viewfinder (and do some fun light flippy shit). The Vampire would not show up when you look through the scope but would appear in your finished photo because the mirror gets flipped out of the way when you take an actual picture. Most digital cameras now are mirrorless (there’s no viewfinder, you look directly at the screen to see what you’re photographing). HOWEVER there are some trace amounts of silver in traditional LCD displays (mostly in the receptor strip… which may impact?) and plasma displays contain a lot of silver so the only way you would be able to see the vampire is if you printed a picture out on paper.
actually when I was in 8th grade and obsessed with twilight my master plan as a twilight vampire was to sit around in famous shipwrecks like the super deep ones where they can only send robots with cameras from their submarines and when they sent one down i’d be sitting there, pretending to drink out of an old tea cup you know for the drama of it all and the guys in the submarine would know what they saw and that it was real footage but who else would believe them? no one important.
but it didn’t stop there. at the next party they threw to celebrate one of their latest finds, some museum-y banquet idk I was 13, I was going to show up. I was going to show up and make eye contact with them one at a time from across the room and they were going to lose their goddamn minds and then before the volturi could catch wind i was gonna be back in the ocean. how could they find me?
the drama. the theatrics. i can’t believe i didn’t realize i was gay right then but that’s another story, also involving vampires,
hate to burst your fantasy, but
1) vampires don’t show up in film
2) vampires can’t cross moving water much less sit at the bottom of the ocean
you’ve got me a in a difficult position here because on the one hand, this post is specifically about vampire lore in Twilight, so you’re wrong, but on the other hand, saying “you clearly didn’t read twilight” doesn’t exactly make you look like the bad guy here
You wanna get killed by the Vulturi? This how how you get killed by the Vulturi.
what’s the guy in the volturi who tracks other vampires gonna say when they’re looking for me???? “yeah I have visual on her….she’s…underwater. really deep there aren’t even any fish around her. yep, she’s definitely somewhere in the ocean.”
like cool get started see ya never
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #vampires #Twilight #fun with loopholes
why is “olde vampires in high school” the big thing and not “olde vampires in college”
everyone in college is eccentric. everyone
you wanna wear full on Victorian suit? the girl in pajamas who clearly hasn’t slept in three days supports you
everyone is too preoccupied to care as long as you’re polite and follow class etiquette
multiple high school diplomas? eh. same stuff. multiple BAs? Enjoy learning chemistry AND art history! All in detail!
wandering around campus at 3am? that’s just the lifestyle tm
no matter how old or young you look it’s not really that weird, there’s sixteen year olds and sixty year olds doing BAs somewhere
big schools are very anonymous so nobody’s gonna bother to hassle you
the girl in pyjamas is the vampire
Also:
If u put ur blood in a water bottle ppl will assume it’s juice and be Jealous
“Oh god I’m a monster” 20 students who r all procrastinating big projects say “same” simultaniousely and with the exact same tone
Everything is a joke so if u say “I subsist on the lifeblood of mankind” someone will go “lol what a mood”
It would take u like 100 years to major in everything
Seen sucking the blood of a fellow classmate and u r instantly the campus Cryptid and Mascot
Listen. If u have an ethical dilemma go find a philosophy major that believes in ethical subjectivism and they’ll make u so angry u forget abt whatever the fuck was bothering u
College is the only acceptable place to get into fistfights over classical literature
Literally all u need to do to avoid suspicion is be the guy that always has gum and a stapler
If u have a majestic mustache ppl will just assume ur an English major
Allergic to crosses? Cool. So r certain stem majors.
We’re also all nocturnal anyway so you’ll make friends with So Many Grad Students who also lurk in the library basement after hours, mulling over their dark decent into madness.
I mean with them it’s feeling bad about misquoting a source but it’s basically the same.
Tags:
#vampires #story ideas I will never write #adventures in University Land #(my university experience has not really been like this but it still seems like a fitting tag)
Much of science has, to date, been concerned with the pressing issue of lycanthropy, or as it is known to the layperson, “werewolfism.” Chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, and suchlike have made much pretense of tending to other matters, offering up such developments as “medicine” or “computers” or “spaceflight” to justify their existence as ordinary, legitimate, non-werewolf-oriented fields of study. Vaccination? Smallpox was a convenient excuse, but we can all see that the real aim of that project was developing antigens to whatever bacteria might be involved in the werewolf process. The Large Hadron Collider might smash tiny particles into tinier particles on a day-to-day basis, but if you press hard enough into CERN’s encrypted blueprints you’ll find the secret designs for loading it with a massive payload of molecularly unstable silver, enough to take out an entire small West European country in the event that it fell to a widespread outbreak of lycanthropy or a swift lycurgarchic coup. The moon landing? It speaks for itself, one should think. How else could NASA mine the moon with a nuclear payload capable of tearing it apart in a worst case scenario? The average citizen might simply accept the fruits of so-called scientific progress, idly enjoying the comforts of smartphones and hot pockets and downloadable pornography, but the truthseer dares to ask question. He dares to ask, why would anyone invent the telescope, if not to keep track of the coming werewolf threat? Why would mankind dare slip the surly bonds of gravity in magnificent flying machines, if not to rain down silver-tipped hell on the strictly terrestrial wolfpeople? Why the waffle iron, if not as a weapon of war?
Of course, the existence of a world-spanning conspiracy spending billions of dollars and untold amounts of labor every year to eradicate a small minority of genetic deviants does nothing to exonerate the persecuted werewolves. It has been well known since the times of Imhotep and Euclid that the danger posed by a transformed lycanthrope is sufficient to overwhelm any number of armed persons that might be sent into combat with it, necessitating the development of a technological advantage to leverage untransformed humanity into superiority over the wolf-headed monster. Likewise, the contagious aspect of werewolfism elevates it from a mere danger to life and limb to an outright existential threat, one that would have long since rendered humanity an extinct species trammeled in the wake of homo lupus if not for scientific counteradvances. The danger of werewolves is obvious. But what we must ask ourselves is, if we ordinary people are mere sheep to be preyed upon, then who—or what—lies behind science? What masters drive the engines of human progress? Vampires, obviously. Ancient enemies of werewolfkind, on account of there being only so many necks to go around, they have stockpiled the treasure troves of Mansa Musa and fallen Carthage to fund scientific progress, throwing the scraps to ordinary humanity while keeping the ultrasonic repulsor smartphone apps, silver-projectile railguns, and anti-solar battle mecha to themselves. Every scientist, from the white lab-coated goons of the centrifuge mills to the celebrated celebrity wunderkind of the modern media are held in a vampire’s thrall, whether through their dread hypnotic gaze, or by virtue of being a vampire themselves. Galileo? Vampire. Ada Lovelace? Vampire. Einstein? Double vampire. The trend is undeniable.
Caught, as it were, between a rock and a hard place, the rock being the rock that orbits are planet on a monthly basis and transforms a significant percentage of our population into slavering man-beasts, the hard place being the white tips of a vampire’s fangs against our species’ collective jugular, we have but one choice. In our darkest hour, in the last ragged gasping of humanity’s hope, we must turn to the allies who have been within us from the dawn of time, must draw strength from something we see every day and yet never contemplate. Skeletonkind, our saviors, will rise from the earth, and fight side by side along the “skinfolk,” as they call us, to drive the bleak regime of wolfmans and draculas out of their fortified towers and into the fiery pits of hell. Do your all for mankind. Grab a bottle of milk, and build a strong, deadly skeleton.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #unreality cw #vampires #werewolf
Brinens and Things 